


I Want to be Your Prince

by AlexKingOfTheDamned, swimsalot



Series: More generally unrelated high school shenanigans [1]
Category: The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Child Abuse, F/M, Familial Abuse, Fluff and Angst, Lots of Abuse, M/M, Physical Abuse, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-16
Updated: 2013-05-06
Packaged: 2017-12-08 15:48:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 35,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/763160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexKingOfTheDamned/pseuds/AlexKingOfTheDamned, https://archiveofourown.org/users/swimsalot/pseuds/swimsalot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce Banner just wanted to ask Pepper Potts to prom, how exactly did he end up helping her with her science fair project?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, high school AU. It's been done and redone a hundred million times, but I don't give a shit. Also, un-beta'd.
> 
> #sorrynotsorry

Hands sweating, knees trembling, Bruce faces the most nerve-wracking decision he’s ever made in all his life. He can hardly see straight he’s so anxious, and he’s close to fainting.

 

She’s right down the hall. Long strawberry blonde hair pulled back into a perfect pony tail, dressed in a little white sundress, she’s perfect. Freckled and smiling and dimpled and so oblivious to the fool Bruce is about to make of himself.

 

He walks forward with a momentary surge of confidence, but instantly backs off when he sees another guy walk past him who is taller and more handsome, but he doesn’t approach her and just keeps walking.

 

Bruce swallows, takes another step, she still doesn’t see him. He falls back against the lockers. He wants to cry.

 

Tony had said this would be a good idea. “She doesn’t have a date, Bruce, and you’ve got a huge crush on her. Now’s your chance.”

 

What a stupid idea, Stark. She’s way too perfect for a guy like Bruce. His heart is hammering in his chest, and he’s hiding his face in his hands, fingers behind his oversized glasses so he doesn’t have to see the world.

 

He's close to hyperventilating, sure he's going to have a heart attack just from thinking of doing this, when a hand falls on his shoulder, making him jump about six feet in the air with a shamefully high-pitched yelp.  
  
"Oh, sorry Bruce. I didn't mean to scare you." Pepper laughs, taking a step back. "I saw you and was wondering if you could help me with something."

 

Bruce tries to swallow again, but his mouth has gone dry. “Oh – oh, um, yeah, sure,” he mumbles. “I could do that, wh-what do you need?”

 

"Alright you have to swear you won't tell Tony. Cross your heart or I'll walk away right now. He can not know about this or I'll never live it down." she says, looking serious but her eyes bright and laughing.

 

Bruce quickly traces an X over his heart with an enthusiastic nod.

 

"My science teacher is forcing all of us to participate in this year’s science fair or fail the class. I'm good at theoretical work but I can't do anything in the real world so I need your help." she says looking a little anxious. "You're really brilliant and I can't afford a bad grade. I'd ask Tony but he's an ass and he'd make me repay him somehow. I don't want to inconvenience you and it's fine if you say no! I just had to ask."

 

Bruce stares at her, mouth agape, probably for longer than he should. Then he blurts, “I’ve been banned from state science fairs because I’ve consistently won and the judges don’t think it’s fair that the statistics have been so skewed, the chances of anyone else winning a ribbon just because I show up decreases by 89%.” He swallows. “But, um, I could help _you._ ”

 

Pepper blinks at him for a minute then starts to laugh.  
  
"Is that a yes? Please tell me there was a yes in there somewhere."

 

“Y-yeah, yeah, I can help you. Well… I mean I could tell you what to do. Not tell! Help. But not help too much. Not enough that my name is on it. Because… they would consider that cheating.” Bruce babbles.

 

"No, no nothing like that. Just some help brainstorming and making sure it's not completely juvenile. I'll need a place to keep it too if that's not too much trouble." Pepper says, seeming nervous. "No room at my place."

 

Bruce suddenly looks nervous. “Um, my place isn’t really good either… my dad doesn’t like it when I have company over.”

 

"That's fine. It'll just have to be small enough to stay in my car." Pepper says, with a shrug. Then she grins and throws the arm not holding her books around Bruce, pulling him into a hug.  
  
"Thank you so much Bruce. I knew I could count on you."

 

Bruce tries to say “you’re welcome” but he just sort of whimpers, and then the bell rings and she runs off to lunch to join her friends.

 

Dazed beyond speech, Bruce walks numbly to lunch as well, and falls down onto the bench at his usual table with his friends. Steve and Tony are sitting on one side of the table, Natasha and Clint to his left, and Thor and Loki to his right.

 

“So? How’d it go?” Clint asks. “Did you ask her to prom?”

 

Bruce blinks at him and shakes his head. “Um, no, but… now I’m helping her with her science fair project.”

 

"You tried to ask her to prom and ended up agreeing to do her homework?" Natasha says with a roll of her eyes. "Wow Banner and here I thought you'd finally grown a pair."

 

Bruce looks over at her with a wet puppy expression, but doesn’t say anything.

 

“You know, I knew something like that would happen,” Tony laughs. “Go in for a date come out with a project partner. That is so you.”

 

“I was going to, but then she asked me and then she just left before I could form… words again,” Bruce covers his face with his hands.

 

"Well you'll have plenty of time to ask her, won't you?" Loki sneers. "Plenty of time alone, just the two of you, all cozy together in whatever cute little suburban nightmare she's living in."  
  
"Why'd she ask you for help anyway?" Tony butts in. "Is she failing? Is my Perfect Pepper Potts struggling with an actual class?"

 

“Science fair project,” Bruce mutters.

 

“Weren’t you like, redacted from the high school science fair community?” Clint snorts.

 

“Banned, not redacted,” Bruce frowns. “But yes. Which is why I’m just… brainstorming with her.” 

 

"For her. You could use this to your advantage Banner. Offer to do the project for her if she puts out." Natasha sniggers along with Loki.

 

“No!” Bruce says, as though he’s horrified by the very idea. “I don’t want to do that! I don’t just want her to – to _put out_. I totally, I don’t even care, I mean I don’t – don’t say that, that’s rude.”

 

Natasha shrugs. "Then why bother? You're not getting anything out of it."  
  
"I'm gonna go ask her why she didn't ask for my help. I'm insulted, I deserve an explanation." Tony says, rising to his feet.  
  
"Sit down, we're helping Bruce right now." Steve orders, tugging Tony back into his seat by his shirt. Once he's sure the other boy isn't going anywhere he turns back to Bruce. "This could be really good for you Bruce. If you spend some time together you won't be so nervous. I think it's great."

 

“Yeah, if I don’t throw up on her because I’m too scared to talk to her,” Bruce mutters. “Ohh, why did I have to fall for the only girl in school I can’t look in the eye?” he lays his face on the table.

 

After the last bell rang Bruce bid his friends goodbye, watching them all head for the buses or in Tony's case his limo, in favor of heading to the library where he and Pepper had agreed to meet.  
  
He arrives to find her already there, looking perfectly at home at one of the old wooden tables with several books stacked next to her. She's flipping through one and looks up, breaking into a huge grin at the sight of him.  
  
"I was worried you might have forgotten." she says quietly when he joins her at the table. "No no, sit on this side with me." she says when he tries to take the seat across from her. "It'll be easier to talk if we're next to each other."

 

Bruce’s heart is hammering in his chest as he takes the seat beside her, and he can only hope he won’t be soaked with sweat by the time this is over. Once they get into talking about science he should be fine though, he only has to hold out until then.

 

“Did you have any, um, ideas? So far?” he encourages gently.

 

"It's a biology class so I thought we could start with ideas there so I at least have some idea of what I'm looking at." she says, pushing her book towards him. "That's the text book. I almost wish I had taken physics instead, then I could just do a computer simulation."

 

“It’s not always that easy,” he laughs as he takes the book. “What you’re thinking of is actually theoretical physics, not physics in practice. Theoretical physics is just thinking, but to have a proper physics presentation you’d need a force acting on a material substantially, something the judge could play with and explore.” He looks up to see Pepper’s brows raised at him, and he shrinks down a little bit. “But, um, you’re not taking either so nevermind.”

 

"You know a lot about this sort of thing." Pepper says with a smile. "I'm more into English and History and Art. I'm very good at math but science has always been my worst subject. Got into the AP class though and now I'm completely lost. I know how everything works but trying to make a project out of it is beyond me."

 

“I would suggest you have Tony turn around and tutor you in science, but… I don’t think he would,” Bruce laughs gently. “You’re going to be an amazing business woman one day.”

 

Pepper blushes and tugs at her pony tail nervously. "I hope so, thanks. I'd really like to be a curator at an Art gallery or museum."

 

“No, I mean like, you could… like change the world. You have amazing grades, and you’re definitely going to get into an awesome college, there’s like, nothing you couldn’t do. I mean, well I mean if you wanted. To do it.” Bruce wishes he had a ponytail to tug on too.

 

"You're sweet." Pepper says, smiling at him. "I want to work somewhere beautiful, that's all I know. There aren't enough beautiful things in the world so I'd like to surround myself with as many of them as I can. And if I can't do that I'd like to be a lawyer and try to make the world a little better."

 

Bruce wants to say something cheesy like “there’s at least one beautiful thing” but that sort of line only works when you’re Tony Stark, so he just fidgets and cleans his glasses and clears his throat.

 

“A-Anyway we should definitely brainstorm,” he says as he pushes his glasses back onto his nose.

 

Two hours later and they have a decent list of ideas, with the intention to start working on it tomorrow. Bruce bids her farewell and almost offered to drive her home before he remembered that she owns a car, and is instead glad that he had spared himself that embarrassment.

 

“Thank you Bruce,” she said after he’d walked her to her car. “I’ll see you tomorrow, same time same place?”

 

“Um, yeah,” he smiles as she tosses her books into the car.

 

“Thanks again,” she leans in to give him a quick kiss to the cheek, and then ducks into her car. Bruce almost faints against the car beside hers as she pulls away.


	2. Chapter 2

Pepper doesn't go home immediately. She goes to the Laundromat first to iron her clothes for school tomorrow and hangs them up in the back seat of her car. Then it’s the grocery store to make sure she and her brothers have something for dinner because their mom may have forgotten again. Then a quick stop at Tony's to give him the homework he left in his locker and then finally, she goes home.  
  
It's dark when she pulls up into the trailer park and stops in front of her families beat up old trailer. She changes out of her nice dress into old jeans and a tee-shirt there in the car, keeping a careful lookout for any one who might be watching before heading inside, books tucked under her arm.   
  
The whole place smells like booze and cigarettes with an undertone of sweat that makes her want to take a shower as soon as she crosses the threshold. She starts toward her tiny room, the one she shares with her newest brother, eight month old Joshua, to drop her books only to have her path blocked by this year's "he's going to be your new daddy kids", Paul.  
  
"Out late again huh sugar?" he asks, leaning close enough that Pepper can smell the cheap whiskey on his breath.   
  
"I was studying. Where's mom?" Pepper asks, taking a step back and holding her books in front of her like a shield.  
  
"Picked up another shift. She won't be back til late, like mother like daughter huh?" he laughs. "Don't look much alike though. Maybe she was a pretty as you when she was younger."  
  
"Sure. Can I get to my room now? I have homework." she replies, her knuckles turning white from holding her books so tight. The way he's looking at her makes her skin crawl just like every other time they have to interact.

 

“I could help you,” he says, leering down at her without looking her in the eye. “Since I’m gonna be your new _daddy_ and all, it’s what _daddies_ do, don’t they?”

 

"I'd rather get the questions right." Pepper says coolly, taking about step back and reaching into her purse to touch the canister of pepper spray she always carries. She doubts she'll need to use it but it's reassuring to know it's there.

 

“Oh come on, don’t be a little bitch!” he snaps, reaching forward to grab her by the arm, but when he sees her hand flex around something in her purse, he uncrinkles and smiles again, his breath stinking through the gap in his teeth. “Alright, sugar, relax, I ain’t gonna do you no hurt.”

 

"I know." she responds, no longer cool but tense and angry. They face off for a moment before the silence is broken by a cry from her bedroom.  
  
With one last glare Pepper pushes her way past Paul to find Joshua standing up in his crib, clutching side and screaming for all the world to hear.  
  
Tossing her books onto her bed Pepper goes to him, lifting the baby out of the crib to settle him on her hip, one arm supporting his back while she holds his small hand.  
  
Homework is obviously going to have to wait, she thinks as she carries him out into the living room/kitchen and starts searching through the refrigerator for his bottle. That's alright. Another all-nighter won't kill her.

 

“Fuckin’ prude bitch,” she hears Paul mutter from the couch as he scratches his crotch less than subtly. She knows not to engage him though, so she just sits Joshua in his high chair and hands him his bottle.

 

At that exact moment, her five-years-younger sister Leslie gives an ear-splitting screech and comes tearing into the tiny living room, calling out Pepper’s name. She has a very large chunk of very red hair missing, and their brother Adam comes running right out behind holding the chunk of hair in one hand, and a big pair of scissors in the other.

 

“Pepper!” Leslie shrieks. “Pepper help please please Pepper help!”

 

“God dammit you fuckin’ kids I’m watchin’ TV!” Paul thunders.

 

"Shhh, alright you two come here." Pepper says, beckoning the kids to her. She immediately takes the scissors away from Adam and gives him a good scolding for running with them before sending him to his room for a time out until she can think of a better punishment for cutting off his sister's hair.  
  
"Alright Leslie, sit down." she says, leading the little girl over to the table. She sits her down and starts examining the damage. A good four inches are off the left side. There's not much she can do other than brush the rest out and cut all so it's neat and even.  
  
"There you go." she says when shes done, setting the scissors aside to kneel in front of her little sister. "Oh that looks nice! You look so grown up with it short!"

 

Leslie looks into the little hand mirror with a teary smile. “It’s not so bad,” she sniffles with a nod.

 

"It's gorgeous." Pepper says, standing up. She goes over to the grocery bags and comes back with a box. "I got these for dessert but because you've been such a good girl you can have an extra early, okay? But don't tell Adam."  
  
She opens the box to reveal brownies fresh from the grocery store's bakery. Leslie stops crying instantly and grabs the biggest one she can see, settling in to enjoy it while Pepper starts making dinner.

 

“You’re gonna make such a good baby mommy one day,” Paul snorts from the conjoined living room, and Pepper and Leslie look at one another and share an eye-roll.

 

===

 

Giddy with the possibility that he might actually have the opportunity to ask Pepper to Prom, nothing could ruin Bruce’s mood.

 

Or at least, he thought nothing could ruin it. Until he pulled into the driveway at 7 sharp, to see his father standing in the front doorway to greet him. As usual. He turns off all the lights in his car and rolls up all the windows and gathers his things under his father’s watchful eye.

 

His father has always made him uncomfortable. Incredibly strict and always just a little bit angry, there’s not a single inch of room for misstep if Bruce wants to keep his glasses from being knocked off his face.

 

“Good evening, sir,” he greets as usual with a polite nod, offering him eye contact like he’s supposed to and waiting to be invited into his own house.

 

"Where've you been? Off fucking up with those bastard friends of yours?" his father demands, not moving an inch. He glares down at Bruce, searching for any sign of where he's been and what he might have been doing.

 

“No, sir,” he says. “I was helping a classmate brainstorm for their science fair project, sir,” he says, still standing stock still and waiting, and hoping it won’t be another night he has to sleep on the porch bench with his mother sneaking dinner out to him.

 

"Doing someone else's homework instead of your own? Don't give a shit about your future do you, you little fuck?" his father growls. "Didn't even call to say you were gonna be late. Shoulda just locked you out."

 

“No, sir I’m not doing someone else’s homework instead of my own, I already completed mine. And I did call sir. Mother picked up, and I told her. She said you weren’t home yet.” He instantly regrets saying this, because it might set his father off on his mother. All he can do is pray his father will still blame him for not calling again to _make sure_ he knew where Bruce would be.

 

His father's eyes narrow but he grunts "Bitch was at the supermarket.," Before turning to go into the house. "Next time you fucking call again. I got you that piece of shit cell phone for a reason."

 

“Yes sir,” Bruce says, knowing better than to stutter, even though he’s terrified and he knows he’s just dodged a bullet. “Can I come in sir?”

 

His father nods. "You'll do your homework before you get anything to eat you ungrateful little prick."

 

Bruce nods even though he already told his father that he finished his homework already, and steps into the house, placing his books at the edge of the shoe-holder so he can stoop to remove his shoes on the carpet. However, his father hasn’t left to go to his study like he normally does, Bruce can still see his feet. Fear flutters through him, but he knows better than to let it show on his face. His father hates it when Bruce looks scared.

 

“Sir?” he asks as he slips out of his shoes and rises to a stand.

 

"What's that on your face?" his father growls.   
  
He doesn't wait for an answer but grabs Bruce by the collar and hauls him up to get a look at him in the light. There on his cheek is the shiny smudge of Pepper's lip gloss.  
  
"You fucking liar." the man growls, tossing Bruce against the wall. "Helping a friend with a project. You were off chasing some slut."

 

“Wh- no!” Bruce looks quickly into the hall mirror and sees the mark left on his cheek, and he curses himself for not checking his face in his car mirror before walking into the house. “No, sir, that’s not true, we _were_ working in the library – you can even call the school and ask the librarian, I was there with my classmate when she checked out three books. Please, sir, I wouldn’t lie to you,” he says, trying very hard not to cower.

 

His father grabs him and pushes him into the living room, advancing on the teen with balled fists.   
  
"I work all day to put food on your fucking plate and keep you and your mother in a good house and this is the thanks I get?" he snarls. "Instead of trying to make something of yourself you spend your time fucking some bitch? Think you can get by on nothing don't you? You go knock up some slut and I end up having to support you and some damn kid but that doesn't matter to you does it, you selfish defective piece of crap!"

 

“No, sir, that isn’t true,” Bruce says, trying and almost failing to keep from raising his voice. “Call the school, you can call the school, the librarian can’t lie to a parent, she can give records, I’m sure there’s camera footage. P-please, sir, I know better than to lie to you.”

 

"Lying son of a bitch!" His father yells, pulling back his fist and hitting Bruce hard in the face, not hard enough to leave a bruise but more than enough to hurt. "I don't need to call your school to know you're a guilty lying shit! I can hear it in your voice."

 

Bruce collapses back against the wall and tries to count his pulse to keep from whimpering. He feels angry when his father does this, he always feels so angry. He wants to lash back, he wants to cry out and hurt him back, but he’s too small for that.

 

“I’m not lying,” he says again when he can talk without stammering.

 

His father ignores him and kicks him hard in the stomach, slamming Bruce's back against the wall again. "You shut the fuck up! You'll get what you deserve then you'll get the fuck out of my sight, you understand?"

 

Bruce breathes through his nose to keep from yelling or whimpering, and he just nods and prepares himself for the oncoming storm.

 

The next morning Pepper is to school bright and early despite having gotten almost no sleep the night before. Her mother and Paul had been extraordinarily loud, distracting her from her studies and waking Leslie and Joshua who she then had to set her work aside for again to make sure they got back to sleep.

But she'd covered the bags under her eyes with a bit of concealer and manages to keep a smile on her face as she greets her various friends as they trickle in for the day.

When she sees Bruce though her smile isn't forced and she practically skips over to his locker.

"I just wanted to say thank you again for helping me." She says, standing beside him. "Can we have another session? If you're not busy, my schedule is pretty flexible."

 

Bruce flinches when she approaches and listens quietly, feeling guiltier by the second. “Oh, um… I don’t know… i-if I’ll be able to… keep helping you,” he says anxiously, tugging at the edge of his turtleneck collar. “Um, I forgot to call my dad to tell him that I’d be home late, and he didn’t like that so I’m not allowed to come home late anymore.”

 

He looks up at her with big grey eyes, searching, wondering if she’ll be the one he’s heard of, the one that will see through his lies, see to his bruises and hidden pain and make a report, but he tries not to be hopeful. He’s been looking for that person for years.

 

Pepper blinks and tilts her head a little in confusion. "Why don't you ask tonight if we can work at your place then? You'll be home on time and your dad will be able to see you're not getting yourself into trouble. Unless you were supposed to be home to do work or something."

 

"Um, I-I don't-" he stammers and swallows. "It might be okay...if I get my homework done first. I'll do it in lunch. Or something. I'll call and ask later, but um, don't get your hopes up."

 

"That's fine. We could always work on weekends if you're free then." she says still looking at his with that same head tilt like she's trying to work out a very difficult math problem. She gently lays a hand on his arm like he's a small animal who might bolt if she moves too quickly. "Bruce, are you alright? Did something happen? I hope I didn't get you into trouble."

 

"No, um, you didn't get me in trouble. I should have called. It's my fault." He says, offering her a very pained, forced smile.

 

Pepper doesn't let him go. If anything she looks even more concerned. "Bruce something is wrong. You sound scared. If something happened you can tell me you know, I'll help you. I don't want to make any assumptions but you don't look well."

 

He looks her in the eye. He could tell her. He could tell her right now, she could call the police, he would go away. He could tell her -

 

He's too scared.  He shakes his head. "Really, I'm fine. I didn't sleep well last night is all."

 

Pepper doesn't look like she's buying it but she doesn't push him any further. She makes a note to herself to keep an eye on him. He doesn't look well and she thinks she sees a bruise, just barely visible above the line of his turtleneck.

"Alright if you say so. I didn't either. I had Latin and French homework and I had to study for a trig test today. I need to start doing what I did last year and get all my homework done two weeks in advance." she laughs. "Any way, let me know about meeting at your place. I won't be a bother, I promise."

 

Bruce uses the time before school starts to go around to all of his teachers and collect the homework early. They all assume he's doing it because he's leaving early, and are surprised to see him in class with the homework already done and ready to be turned in. They laugh it off, aware that Bruce has an exceptionally restless mind, and accept his homework early. 

 

By lunch, all he has left afterwards is gym and shop, neither of which give homework, so he excuses himself from the table to go call his father. He knows the man is currently on break so he can't get mad at him for interrupting him.

 

The phone rings and by the time his fathher says "what do you want boy" he already has something rehearsed. 

 

"Hello sir. I am calling to ask if I can have a friend over to sot at the kitchen table and - um work on her science fair project. Um, like I told you yesterday. If we sit at the table you can supervise us, sir. I already have all my homework done for the day and handed in."

 

"Two hours. She can come over for two hours and you aren't moving from that table. Understand?" His father snaps back. "And if I hear you're lying about your homework I'll make you regret it."

 

"Yes sir! Thank you sir! Have a good day at work sir!" he exclaims excitedly, and hangs up. He rushes through the cafeteria, vision tunneled to the back of Pepper's head, excited past words. But then once he gets to the table there are eight pairs of "popular" eyes glaring at him, and he loses his nerve and begins to slink away backwards.

 

Pepper sees her friends looking behind her and swivels around to see Bruce, quietly shuffling away. She gives her friends pointed glares before jumping to her feet and hurrying over to him.

 

"I'm sorry about them." She says, falling in step with him. "They're not always the nicest but they do have their better attributes. Did you have something to tell me?"

 

"Oh, um, my father says you can come over for two hours, but we have to stay at the kitchen table. And it'd probably be a good idea if you wait until you go home to have dinner, because he doesn't like 'feeding extra mouths.' Oh and um he likes to be addressed as sir. And he likes eye contact. Um, just don't talk to him too much unless you're directly spoken to and you should be fine." Bruce says with a smile.

 

"That's fine. We'll be busy anyway and I like eating with my brother and sister." Pepper says, instantly brightening. She doesn't mention that being there when they have dinner is the only way she knows they'll get something to eat.  "Thank you so much Bruce. Should I bring anything? I can bring over cookies or something as a thank you if that will help with your father."

 

" No, he doesn't eat sweets. My mom would just end up eating them and dad put her on - um she's on a diet. Just be ready to work hard, he'll appreciate that more than anything." Bruce smiles, already excited. Two hours that Pepper is there is two hours his father can't be mean. "Oh, and one more thing. Um, don't wear lip gloss."

 

Pepper looks a little surprised but quickly shrugs it off. "Sure. Should I go no makeup at all or just lipgloss?"

 

“Oh, no, I think just no lipgloss is okay,” he says. “Um, I should go get… food. Lunch. Since I’ll be eating late. Um, meet me at the back door to the parking lot right after school and you can drive behind me to my place.”

 

Pepper nods in agreement. "Perfect. Can you tell Tony that even with this project I'll be meeting with him tomorrow to get him ready for his history test? Thanks."

 

And with that and a quick smile she turns back around to rejoin her friends.

 

Her friends all look over Pepper’s shoulder as the awkward boy shuffles away. “Who the heck is that and why were you talking to him?” Bruce hears them ask, and he shuffles away faster before he can hear the answer.

 

He arrives back at his table with a smile. “Pepper and I have another, um, study date. Also, she wants me to remind Tony that you and she are meeting tomorrow to study.”

 

“Are you two going to the library again?” Clint asks, elbowing the boy in the ribs.

 

“No,” Bruce clears his throat. “She’s, um, coming over. T-to my place.”

 

Silence across the table.

 

“ _What?_ ” Tony blurts. “No one _ever_ goes over to your place! You never let us!”

 

“None of you ever want to come over to do homework,” Bruce shrugs and plucks a French fry off of Steve’s tray.

 

"That's good Bruce. It’s more personal." Steve says, ignoring the fry and pushing his plate a little closer to Bruce and Clint. "Just remember to be a gentleman, don't assume anything."

 

"He's having her over to his place. That's second only to being invited to her house." Tony says gleefully. "He's in. He can assume whatever he wants."

 

“We’re staying at the kitchen table the whole time, I’m not assuming anything,” Bruce mutters.

 

"She'll probably bring along a chaperone." Natasha adds. "Just to make sure Bruce doesn't accidentally breathe on her and steal her virtue."

 

“Don’t say it like that,” Bruce whimpers and lays her head down on the table.

 

He barely manages to stay focused for the rest of the day, and even asks to be excused during gym to visit the library so he can check out a few books to help Pepper. This is exactly how he’s going to get close enough to her to ask her to prom in two months, and he’s going to do everything in his power to make it work.

 

He meets her at the door, and after a short drive, they pull into the driveway in front of Bruce’s house. Pepper has a look of completely bewildered awe as she stares up at the blue-fringed white house. If it could be called a house. It’s closer to a McMansion.

 

“Oh, um, my mom’s a doctor and my dad’s a scientist so… we’re a little bit well-off. Um, nothing like Tony though,” Bruce explains as he closes Pepper’s car door for her.

 

Pepper stares in awe, thinking back to her little four room trailer that had been converted to five rooms to accommodate her and her siblings. Compared to that this is paradise.

 

"It’s lovely Bruce. Much nicer than Tony's house. At least this looks like people are meant to live here." She says, remembering her manners.

 

Bruce laughs. “I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind living in a skyscraper like Tony. I bet the view’s great.”

 

The door suddenly opens and Bruce’s father appears with arms crossed. He looks a lot like Bruce, with a lot of grey in his hair and his eyes sharp and piercing behind rimless glasses.

 

“Wipe your shoes on the mat before you remove them,” he whispers to Pepper as they come up the front walk. Pepper offers Mr. Banner a smile, which he doesn’t return.

 

“Two hours,” Bruce’s father reminds him.

 

“Yes, sir,” Bruce says, looking up at the man in the eye. “Two hours, sir. May we come in, sir?”

 

Pepper tilts her head again, trying to figure out exactly what's going on here, but doesn't say anything. She follows Bruce into the house when his father steps aside and is careful to wipe her shoes on the front mat before taking them off in the hall and setting them neatly aside.

 

"Pleased to meet you Mr. Banner, sir." Pepper says confidently, offering her hand to Bruce's father as non-confrontationally as she can without looking frightened.

 

He doesn’t look impressed as he shakes her hand, but he doesn’t look angry, either. Bruce considers that a win.

 

“Bruce will take you to the kitchen table,” he says gruffly before walking away and closing the door to his study.

 

“Sorry about him,” Bruce whispers as quietly as he can as he takes his shoes off.

 

"It's fine." Pepper says, letting Bruce lead her into the kitchen. She takes the seat next to him and lays her books out on the table before retrieving the list they had come up with the day before. "I was looking at this last night and I circled the ideas that I think will be easiest. If you could just help me come up with an outline for them I can do the work myself and I'll only have to call you if things start going wrong."

 

They look over the list, discussing happily away, and Bruce finds himself looking at the clock every few seconds. He’s terrified of what will happen if he accidentally lets Pepper stay even a minute past two hours.

 

His father comes in and out of the kitchen every now and then to listen to what they’re talking about and sometimes he tells Bruce to sit up straighter. Bruce makes sure there’s a coaster under the glass of ice water he gives Pepper, and promises his father he’ll wash the dishes later.

 

About an hour into their session, after they finally settled on an idea and started the planning process, there’s the sound of keys jangling at the front door, and then the door swings open. A sing-song voice calls out, “Bruce, sweet heart, I’m home!”

 

Bruce immediately smiles. He loves that his mother always calls out to let him know when she’s come home. “I’m in the kitchen mom,” he says without shouting, knowing that his father doesn’t like it when he raises his voice.

 

“Darling, you wouldn’t believe – ” a woman comes into the kitchen with big grey eyes that look identical to Bruce’s, and long wavy brown hair tied in a ponytail over her shoulder. She’s wearing a pair of medical scrubs beneath a long white coat. She sees Pepper, and her eyes crinkle up into the biggest smile Pepper has ever seen on a grown woman. “Who’s this?” she asks, grinning between the two teens.

 

“Mom, you took your stethoscope home with you again,” Bruce mutters, blushing, and stands to help remove his mother’s coat (and stethoscope) “Um, mom, this is Pepper. Um, Pepper Potts. Pepper, meet my mom.”

 

“Oh my gosh, this is just darling,” Mrs. Banner looks over the table with a grin, and scans the notes and diagrams. “I’m going to make you two a snack.” 

 

"That's alright, ma'am, you don't have to do that." Pepper says quickly. "You must be exhausted. I'll be going home for dinner in an hour anyway. Please, don't worry about it."

 

“Then it’ll be a _little_ snack,” she grins, and Bruce nods to Pepper to let her know it’s okay.

 

“What won’t I believe, mom?” Bruce asks. “You were saying something when you came in.”

 

“Oh, nevermind that boring story, I want to know how you convinced a pretty young girl to sit at a table with you,” his mother grins over her shoulder at him as she pulls out a tree of celery and begins to wash it. Bruce just blushes.

 

"Actually, I asked Bruce. I needed some help with a science project and he took AP bio last year so I thought he could give me a hand." Pepper says, smiling at Bruce. He's kind of cute when he blushes.

 

“He’s been taking AP bio since third grade,” Bruce’s mom laughs. “So this is a school date, huh?”

 

At that exact moment, Mr. Banner comes into the kitchen with a sour expression on his face.

 

“Hello dear,” Mrs. Banner says with a smile, but Pepper can hear that her tone has tightened considerably.

 

“This doesn’t sound like a conversation about schoolwork,” he says sternly.

 

“Sorry, sir,” Bruce says quietly. “We won’t get distracted again.”

 

Something about Mr. Banner has Pepper itching to grab her pepper spray but she refrains. He hasn't done anything wrong. Just because his wife and son look absolutely terrified every time he walks in the room isn't enough evidence to attack him. But the tension in the room is enough to make her duck her head and refocus on her project so she doesn't cause Bruce any trouble.

 

He leaves again, and Mrs. Banner leans out over the two of them and sets down a stack of celery and two small dishes with peanut butter and ranch dressing. She kisses the side of Bruce’s head and whispers something in his ear too quietly for Pepper to hear, but she sees Bruce nod before his mother leaves the room as well.

 

“Anyway, we should get back to work,” Bruce clears his throat and reaches for a celery stalk. “Don’t worry about eating it, um, since mom made it, it’s okay. Dad has… weird rules.”

 

"I'm really not hungry." Pepper says, but takes a celery stick anyway to be polite. "I'm not causing you guys any trouble by being here am I? I can leave if you'd like. We can meet at the town library on Saturday."

 

“It’s… not really any trouble,” Bruce whispers as he looks back over his shoulder. “But we really should get back to work. We can talk about another study date later at school.”

 

They get as far as they can in forty-five minutes before Bruce decides it’s time for them to start packing up so that Pepper has plenty of time to get out the door and nobody will get in trouble. She has to use the bathroom, and he tells her to make sure that the toilet paper is ripped in a straight line and not jagged, and to leave the light off and the door open when she’s done.

 

While she’s in the bathroom, he quickly scribbles her a note, just telling her she's doing a great job, and presses it between the cover and front page of her science text book, and slips it into her bag along with all her papers. He’s standing in front of the door with the whole thing packed up and held out for her to slip right into with a smile.

 

He walks her to her car with her after letting his father know he’ll be right back, and Mr. Banner stands in the doorway to survey the exchange of their goodbye. Darn, Bruce was secretly hoping for another cheek kiss. He knows she can tell that would be a bad idea.

 

“I’ll see you in school tomorrow,” he says with a smile as she ducks into her car. He waits until she pulls out of the drive way before walking back up to the house, his father still in the doorway. He hates it when he has to ask to come in more than once in one night. “Can I come in sir?” he asks gently.

 

"You got her out pretty quick. Are you ashamed of something?" his father asks, glaring down at him. "Our house not good enough for you and your guests?"

 

Bruce looks down at his watch. She’s out ten minutes earlier than two hours exactly. “Um, no sir,” he says. “I thought it would be better if she was out early instead of late.”

 

His father stands there for another moment before stepping inside and leaving the door open for Bruce. "Go help your mother with dinner. I've waited long enough for my damn meal."

 

“Yes sir,” he says, and he doesn’t even have to fake his subservience. His favorite part of every day is making dinner with his mother. He dreads the day his father tells him that he should be working instead of making dinner with mom, like “a real man.” He knows it’s coming, and soon, so he cherishes this time with his mother even more. The time when his mom will dollop cream on his nose and call him her beautiful boy.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this one is so short?

Pepper hurries home, stopping in the driveway to change into a stained tee shirt and ripped jeans again before heading inside. Her mom's car is already there and she can hear yelling and Joshua's crying coming from inside the trailer before she even reaches the steps. She pauses with one hand on the railing, taking her last few breaths of fresh hair before heading into the haze of smoke and stale booze that permeates the small building.

The room is so smoky it burns her eyes and throat when she steps through the door and she has to use her inhaler to keep from having an asthma attack on the spot. Mom's obviously had a hard day and has already smoked a pack since she's been home.

"I'm back." she yells, hurrying into the kitchen to rescue her baby brother from his high chair where he's screaming and beating his cup against the tray, trying to get some attention over the sound of their mother and Paul's fight.

 

She ducks an empty beer bottle as it comes flying past her head, and quickly locks herself in her room, where Leslie and Adam are already hiding in her closet. They scamper onto her bed on either side of her and she starts to sing to them just loud enough to be heard over the sound of the screaming.

 

Eventually the screen door screeches open and slams shut, and Paul’s shouting can be heard outside.

 

“Pepper!” her mother hollers. Pepper quickly hands Joshua to her sister and hurries out to the living room. “Feed the kids, I’m going out for a smoke!” she snaps as soon as she sees the teen and leaves out the door as well, letting it slam shut behind her.

 

Pepper sighs and goes back into her bedroom where her three little siblings are huddled together in a frightened heap on her small bed. They look so small and pitiful that it makes her cringe a little, knowing they're all looking up at her for help.

"Alright you heard mom. Let's all head into the kitchen and I'll make spaghetti and hot dogs." she says, smiling as brightly as she can and lifting Joshua back into her arms.

 

Sitting around the tiny plastic table half an hour later, Pepper is chatting away happily with her siblings, who aren’t even playing with their food they’re being so good. They know that when their mommy fights with her boyfriend then it means Pepper has to be mommy for the night, and so they’re always good for Pepper on those nights.

 

An hour after that, after her siblings have been put to bed, Pepper’s mom comes back into the trailer reeking even more strongly of cigarette smoke than the trailer itself, and although Pepper’s eyes sting she forces herself to smile.

 

“Did you make up?” she asks.

 

“Hell no we ain’t made up,” her mother says with a sigh as she leans against the door. “I think he’s gonna leave soon, the asshole.”

 

"Can't say I'll be sad to see him go." Pepper says, going back to washing the dishes. Paul's not the worst of her mother's boyfriends but he's definitely not her favorite. He's gotten too comfortable around her and a little too hands-on and she's more than ready to show him the door. “What was the fight about this time?"

 

Her mother scrubs her hands over her face with a heavy sigh. “I’m pregnant again,” she says at last.

 

Pepper turns around, ready to throw the plate she's holding at her mother but refrains. "You can't be serious. Another one? Mom, Joshua isn't even a year old yet!"

 

She sets the plate back in the sink and goes to her mother's purse, fishing out the pack of cigarettes she knows will be there. It's more than half empty and she looks at it in disgust.

 

"Mom you know how bad these are for the baby." she says. She'd go into how bad they are for all of them but she knows her mother won't listen to that this time any more than she did the last six times Pepper tried to explain that she was slowly poisoning all of them.

 

“Yeah, well, I hope it dies,” her mother says gruffly, snatching the cigarettes away from Pepper and stuffing them back into her purse. “I can’t feed another kid. I can barely feed you all as it is.”

 

"Don't say that." Pepper sighs. "You'll love the kid as much as us. You don't want to lose it. It is Paul's, right?"

 

“Yes, it’s Paul’s. And he ain’t happy about it,” her mother says with a sigh. She looks over at the leftovers and walks over to dish herself out some, since she hadn’t eaten dinner either. “I swear, I’m gonna absolutely lose it when you go off to college. I won’t be able to do this all on my own.”

 

Pepper looks away without saying a word. Deep down she feels bad because she knows how much her mother relies on her. She does the cleaning and the cooking and helps the kids while their mother is working hard to support them and when she leaves a lot of that help will be gone. She hopes the others will chip in but she doubts they will as much as she did. But her mother has done this so many times that any guilt it inspires pales in comparison to her overwhelming need to get the hell away.

 

"I have homework I need to do." she says finally, putting the last dish away. "Don't worry about cleaning up, I'll wash your dishes before school tomorrow." She gives her mom a quick kiss on the head and a muttered "Love you" before shuffling off to revisit an essay that's due in a few days before going to bed.


	4. Chapter 4

Time is passing a little differently now for Bruce. His life no longer consists of routinely going to school, coming home, going to school, coming home, and then _maybe_ going to Tony’s or Steve’s on Saturday if he’s _really_ lucky (but no sleepovers) but now things have changed. Three days a week he stays an extra hour at school to help Pepper with her project, and on weekends he goes to the public library in town for two hours in the afternoon with her as well.

 

All the Pepper in his life has made him very, very happy. His mother can see it, although she’ll never talk about Pepper when her husband is around. She can tell something bad happened on the subject, because the first time she brought it up, he seemed very agitated. She quickly changed the subject to avoid his wrath.

 

He seems to at least believe Bruce now, assuming that his son would not be so completely rotten that he would pretend to do a science project for two hours straight just to lie about it later and get free time doing nothing constructive. Bruce appreciates the time that his father allots for him to work with Pepper, and tells him frequently.

 

There was one night that was a little frightening in which his father attacked him with a pair of scissors to get hair from his head so he could run a drug test, since “no boy gets as happy as you are as fast as you did unless you’re on something” but when the test came back with nigh a poppy seed, he’s finally believing that it really is just a science project that he’s really enjoying.

 

Pepper worries about Bruce constantly but since he still won't tell her anything there isn't much she can do. She has no proof and she's too busy with her own life to go looking for it.

 

Paul came back after a night out and he and her mother had made up. Loudly. For about four hours. Which is a bit of a load off her shoulders but very much a problem at the same time. Now that her mother is pregnant Paul seems to think he'll be around forever and any boundaries he had have gone entirely. He regularly walks around naked or in only his boxers and flirts with her more openly, even going so far as to pinch her butt one night while she was making dinner.

 

On top of that she has to help her mother prepare for the new baby which means finding space in her room for a second cradle because she always sleeps with the new babies in case they wake up in the middle of the night, and making sure her mother takes the pills she's supposed to be on.

 

Beyond all the work at home she's still responsible for Tony's grades and her own and she wonders how she isn't going mad under the strain of four AP classes and Tony Stark. Most of it she attributes to Bruce. She longs for their hours together. He's smart and funny and doesn't expect anything from her. He genuinely wants to help and is as eager as she is to hide out in the library a few days a week and get lost in their school work, ignoring the rest of the world for a little while. She often finds herself wishing the day would hurry up so she can meet with him again and then begging time to slow down so they have a little bit longer before she has to go home.

 

And every single day,

 

 

“Have you asked her yet?”

 

“No, Tony, I haven’t asked her yet. I told you to stop asking me,” Bruce puts his books in his locker to pull out his books for the next class.

 

Tony's taken to teasing Pepper about her date to prom during their study sessions. Usually she tells him some bullshit answer like "James Bond" or on one memorable occasion "Well your dad is pretty cute" at which point Mr. Stark had walked in and she had promptly lost the ability to speak.

She doesn't understand why he's so interested since he's going with Steve and she doesn't have the heart to tell him she won't be going at all. Prom dresses are too expensive and she can't bring herself to buy one for one night of partying. She needs that money for more important things.

Besides, no one has asked her.

 

“The project is really coming along,” Bruce says one Saturday in the library. He wrings his hands together. “Sort of snowballing, really. Um, pretty soon, I won’t… be able to remain involved without it turning into, um, cheating. And I don’t want you to get in trouble for cheating.”

 

"No, no of course not." Pepper agrees. She doesn't want to think about that though. These afternoons with Bruce are the best part of her week. "No the whole point was to help my grade right? I can't afford to fail this, it'll screw up my GPA."

 

“I don’t think your GPA is in trouble,” Bruce laughs. “You have one of the highest in our grade. Along with Tony and, um, m-myself.”

 

"The highest." Pepper corrects proudly. "I'm happy to say I'm the highest in our year because Tony can't handle anything that doesn't involve equations and, unfortunately, your grammar is terrible."

 

Bruce just chuckles softly, and doesn’t bother to tell her off, because it’s true. “I’m better with numbers than words,” he agrees. “But um, anyway, I think… one more week of helping and you’ll be, um, on your own. And we should probably… um, stop these meetings. My dad would be angry if he found out that we were still meeting and not actually working anymore.”

 

"I could tutor you." Pepper offers eagerly. "I won't charge you or anything. I could help you with English and bring you closer to matching my GPA. I can't let you beat me of course but your dad can't be angry about you making your grades better. For free."

 

Bruce grins, and it looks like he’s actually going to cry. “Yes. Yes, I’ll tell him tonight. But, um, free probably isn’t a good idea. He’ll think we’re doing something else if you aren’t charging for it. It’s not like money is a problem for us, he’ll want to pay you per week and he’ll want the lessons at the house at the kitchen table like the last time we were there. But I think that’s a great idea. I love… spending time with you,” he says, his words trailing off quietly at the end.

 

"Me too." Pepper says, almost reaching for Bruce's hand. She doesn't because she doesn't think he means it like that. Bruce doesn't have many friends and he never seems comfortable around anyone. He probably just likes having someone he can relax around. "In that case, how about 50 dollars a week? Or I could charge 20 for the hour but we usually meet for 5 hours over the course of the week so that would be 100 dollars. You talk to him and ask what he would prefer."

 

That night, Bruce waits until after he’s made dinner with his mother so he’s in a very good mood, and the three of them are sitting at the kitchen table.

 

“Sir, I have good news. I have been speaking with Pepper and she says that she could tutor me in English, since I have a B.  She has the highest GPA in our grade, so she’s the most qualified, and she tutors Mr. Stark’s son, so she has experience. If I tutor with her, here at the house, there is a 100% chance that my grade will increase to an A.” he says carefully, looking his father in the eye with his utensils down at the sides of his plate. His father hates it if he (or his mother) has his fork or spoon or knife in his hand while he talks at the table. Only his father is allowed to speak and hold his utensils at the same time.

 

His father doesn't answer at first but continues to eat his dinner while his wife and son wait anxiously for his reply. Finally he leans back a little, fork and knife still clutched in his hands, and asks gruffly "How much will it cost us? And whatever it is I expect every penny back if your grade doesn't go up."

 

“Fifty dollars a week,” Bruce says quickly. “And don’t worry about my grade sir, she’s very good at her job. I will have an A by the next grade card, or I’ll pay you back myself.”

 

"Four hours a week then, at least three in this house at this table." His father agrees, already returning to his meal.

 

Bruce and his mom exchange eye contact and small smiles, the kind of smile that means she’ll come into his room later to talk, and they too return to their meals.

 

 

 

The news that Pepper will be allowed to tutor him is so wonderful, the two of them actually share a hug in the hall. Bruce feels her feathery hair touch his cheek, and he can smell her perfume, and he wants to faint. It either lasted less than a second or three hours, he’s not entirely sure.

 

“We’ll start next week,” he tells her. “At the kitchen table. We’ll go home right after school on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He wanted four hours, but I told him your Tuesday-Thursday schedule with Tony, and he conceded to three. Um, I mean, if you’re okay. With that. Um, having a full schedule.”

 

"No that's great! If he wants four hours we can do the town library for an hour on Saturday maybe and pick out some books for you." Pepper says. "I have the list of readings for the rest of the year so you can get a head start."

 

“That’d be great,” Bruce says with a grin.

 

Tony asks him again at lunch if he asked her. Says he saw them hugging in the hall. Everyone laughed when Bruce told them she hugged him because she was allowed to tutor him in English.

 

 

The feeling of dread that he’ll have to stop spending time with Pepper vanishes completely, and Bruce can enjoy their last few meetings on the project, the last time he’ll be able to help her with science before she turns around and sees what a dummy he is in English.

 

But when that last Saturday arrives, they find that the library has been closed completely, because of a rat problem. And Bruce’s father doesn’t allow people over to his place on weekends, because that’s his time to relax.

 

Which puts Bruce in the incredibly difficult situation of asking if he can go over to Pepper’s house. She’s waiting in the driveway in her car and she’s been incredibly anxious over the whole thing. He thinks it’s because she’s afraid they’ll be told no. He’s so wrong.

 

“Sir, may I speak with you?” Bruce asks, knocking on the door of his father’s study. It swings open and he immediately looks up into his eyes. “The library has been closed because of rats, sir, and this is my last session helping Pepper with her science project before she’ll begin tutoring me. This particular session is very important, as we are laying out the groundwork for the rest of the project that she must build off of herself, without my assistance. May I go to her home to work? I will be back at the usual time if you allow it.”

 

His father is clearly unhappy but it's Saturday, which means he hasn't been working all day and is in a better mood than usual. He makes Bruce swear to be home at the usual time and not a minute later or he's spending the night outside but then agrees to allow him his two hours at Pepper's home.

 

“He agreed,” Bruce says with his books clutched in his arms as soon as he leaves the house. Pepper is looking so nervous she might burst into tears, so Bruce puts his books on the hood of his car to put his hands on her shoulders instead. “Whoa, hey, what’s wrong?” he asks.

 

"People don't come over to my house." Pepper says, refusing to look up at him. "Never. Not even in elementary school. God, this is going to sound terrible but once you see it you'll probably never want to speak to me again."

 

“Pepper, no way,” he says, mustering the courage to take her chin and gently lift her head so he can look her in the eye. He’s trained himself not to stammer (by talking to his father) as long as he’s looking someone in the eye, and he needs to speak without his usual hesitation. “There is nothing you could possibly show me about your home or your family that would ever, _ever_ make me not want to speak to you. You’re… one of my favorite people. I will brave anything to get this project worked out for you so you can get  your grade higher because I want to see you succeed.” He’s dizzy with his own words, halfway to fainting, and terrified that she’ll shove him off and call him cheesy.

 

Pepper smiles and throws her arms around Bruce's neck, pulling him into a hug. She nearly bursts into tears again, but this time out of relief rather than fear or shame. Bruce is so sweet and understanding that she thinks yes, alright she can trust him. Even with something like this. It's her best kept secret but she's willing to tell Bruce.

"If I bring you to my place you need to swear you will never tell anyone." she says, pulling back so he can look in her eyes and see that she is completely serious. "If I hear one word about it from anyone ever I will die. I will die of shame and horror and betrayal. Swear to me you won't say anything."

 

“I’m so good at keeping secrets, you don’t even know. I was keeping Tony’s secret that he was bisexual since the fourth grade and it never got out until he let it out. Would have ruined his life if it got out that early. So you can trust me. I’m really, really good at keeping secrets.” Bruce says, and he knows his hands are still in hers from when she grabbed them after they broke apart from the hug, but he doesn’t care to pull away just yet.

 

Pepper takes a deep breath and nods, dropping Bruce's hands to open her car door. "Alright. I trust you. I'll drive you. Please ignore everything you see inside it. You'll understand soon enough."

 

Bruce’s eyes widen. “In… your car? You never let anyone in your car,” he says. She grimaces with a nod, and he grabs his books before she unlocks the passenger door for him. He slips inside, and immediately says “wow” to stifle the moan that wants to escape him, because the entire inside of the car smells exactly like her perfume.

 

The entire inside of the car is absolutely spotlessly clean. There are a few necklaces hanging from the rearview mirror that he’s seen her wear, and the ashtray is full of sets of earrings. He sees a few pairs of shoes and purses lined up in the backseat, along with her backpack and all her books. His brow furrows and he straightens his books in his lap, wondering why she has so much of her accessories in her car. He doesn’t ask though, since it’s all orderly there must be a reason she does it. “Your car is really clean,” he says as she starts the engine.

 

"Needs to be." She replies shortly, pulling out of Bruce's drive way. She doesn't see the point of explaining when he'll understand the reason for it soon enough anyway.

Bruce expects her to take him to another suburban neighborhood, one with houses that are probably smaller and less well kept than his where he'll find they haven't cleaned up in a while or something. Instead Pepper drives into town and keeps going, following the main road to the outskirts, where town is still visible but one couldn't consider it a part of the town proper. They don't say anything while she drives and even though the ride is only about ten minutes the tension in the car makes it feel like hours.

Finally she pulls into the trailer park and after a few left turns stops in front of her trailer. Her mother's car is gone so it's just going to be them, the kids and Paul today. Even better.

"Home sweet home." she sighs, turning off the car and taking the keys out of the ignition. "If you could get out and maybe sit on the hood for a few minutes I need to get changed. I can't go inside in this."

 

Bruce doesn’t say a thing, takes his books, and sits on the hood. He wants to gape, but the reality is that he feels… almost happy. Her home life isn’t spectacular, and neither is his. Sure, his has the illusion of being perfect, but secretly he knows what lies beneath that shiny McMansion. He feels even closer to Pepper now, sharing in her grief and her fear and her embarrassment. He could never hate her for this. In fact, he thinks he maybe loves her.

 

He jumps a little when the car door opens, and the sight of Pepper in a beat up old tee shirt and jeans is startling. He hair is down and no longer perfect, and she’s devoid of the little flower-shaped diamond earrings she wears almost every single day.

 

“Wow,” he says. “You look… plain. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look plain before.”

 

"I like dressing nice. But if I wear my nice clothes in there I'll look like I'm homeless no matter what I do." Pepper sighs. "Enjoy your last few breaths of fresh air. You'll need it."

With that she leads him up the steps to the trailer. She opens the door and is even more aware of the overwhelming stench than usual. It hits her like a wall and has her scrambling for her inhaler as she begins to cough and wheeze.

"Another one of my secrets." she says when she sees Bruce eying the inhaler. "Come on."

As soon as she's inside Paul yells asking her to "Put her cute little ass to work and get him a beer and feed the baby," From his spot in front of the TV.

 

Paul lays eyes on Bruce and leers a grin. “Who’s the little nerd?” he says, standing up to get his own beer while Pepper goes to where Joshua is beginning to fuss. He grabs a second beer and offers it to Bruce. “Here, kid. Take a load off.”

 

“Um, no thank you sir,” Bruce says with a shake of his head.

 

“Sir? _Sir?_ ” Paul laughs out loud. “Shoot, this kid’s a regular stepford child ain’t he? Where the hell did you find a skinny little geek like this, sweet heart?”

 

"Call me sweet heart one more time asshole, I dare you." Pepper replies, coming back into the room with Joshua on her hip. She goes to the fridge and gets out a bottle of formula for the baby before joining them in the pitiful excuse for a living room.  "And don't talk to him, you're not worth his time. Bruce, we can work in my room or here at the table if you don't mind him."

 

“Um, your room, if that’s okay,” Bruce says.

 

“Put a sock on the door if you’re gonna fuck!” Paul leers after them, but Pepper ignores him and closes the door. Hard.

 

“I don’t think I’ve _ever_ heard you swear before,” he gapes at her. “That was groundbreaking.”

 

"Yeah well it's hard not to around here." Pepper says, putting Joshua into his crib and falling back onto her bed. The fight seems to drain out of her and she lifts her hands to cover her face, letting out a low utterly mortified groan. "I am so, so sorry about all of this."

“Hey,” Bruce sits on the edge of her bed and places a hand on her knee. “It’s okay. Really, it’s _okay_. I don’t think anything less of you just because you’ve got an ass for an… older… brother?” he assumes.

 

"Mom's boyfriend." Pepper mumbles. "Current boyfriend. They've been together five months and she's pregnant again. Trust me, that was mild for him. At least he had pants on."

 

Bruce frowns and looks back over his shoulder, as if Paul will come walking in without pants. “Well, anyway, we don’t have any extra time just because we’re here, so let’s get to work so I can get back in time.”

 

They get to work and manage to get quite a bit done despite the many interruptions from the kids and Paul asking if they're fucking or needing Pepper to get him something to eat. They finish outlining the project and Pepper introduces Bruce to Adam and Leslie whose first question is if Bruce is going to marry Pepper.

Their hour draws to a close and Pepper takes Bruce back home, getting him there five minutes ahead of schedule. They say their goodbyes and she gives him another hug to thank him for not judging her based on her home. She stays in the car, watching him go inside and wondering how she's going to get the smell of cigarette smoke out of the car and all her stuff by Monday.

That's when it hits her. Bruce stinks like cigarettes and beer. She knows how strict his father is and she doubts he'll be happy with his son coming home reeking of her disgusting house. She looks up in fear, as if she'll see them through their curtained windows and finally have a reason to call the cops. But she doesn't see anything and after ten minutes there's nothing she can do but head back home.

 

“I’m home!” Bruce calls, wiping his shoes before kicking them off, and he dumps his book bag onto the front bench. Right on time, too. He’s very happy for their progress, and he doubts anything could ruin his bad mood. He’s wrong.

 

His father comes out of his study and as soon as he gets within ten feet of Bruce, his expression turns furious. Bruce goes over a split-second mental checklist – why is his father upset? He’s home on time, he took his shoes off after wiping them, his book bag is where it’s supposed to go, either on the bench or in his room, he isn’t wearing his clothes funny, like his buttons unbuttoned or his sleeves rolled – but his father is wearing an expression of rage that makes his blood run icy.

 

“Sir?” he asks weakly.

 

"Where were you? And don't you lie to me and tell me you were studying you little fuck. You stink of cigarettes and booze." His father growls, advancing on him. He reaches out and grabs Bruce's shirt, trapping his son and leaving him no chance at escape. His face is contorted in pure rage and his muscles are tensed, ready to start dealing out blows the second Bruce opens his mouth to answer.

 

Bruce's stomach drops. His face goes pale and he feels dizzy. Of course he smells like Pepper's house, he just spent two hours there. His first instinct is to tell him about how it's Pepper's house that smells like cigarettes and alcohol. But that could only go one of two ways. 

 

One, his father wouldn't believe him, and would hit him.

Or two, his father _would_ believe him, would hit him anyway since a simple "hello" would get him hit when his father in this mood, but then he would also never let Bruce near Pepper again. Bruce would rather get hit a hundred times than give up his time with Pepper. 

 

So he does something insurmountably stupid. He lies. 

 

"I-I'm sorry, sir. I just wanted to try it once. I-I didn't like it very much though, I'll never do it again."

 

If possible his father looks even angrier. He pulls back his fist and punches Bruce hard in the face. Normally the blow would have sent Bruce to the floor, falling hard and leaving him scrambling to his feet but his father's firm grip on his shirt keeps him steady. His head snaps to one side, making his neck sore but not doing any real damage. As soon as he's looking forward again he's met with another blow. And another. And another.

Mr. Banner drops him then, kicking him in the chest and stomach, spitting insults at his son, calling him an ungrateful little son of a bitch, a disrespectful piece of shit and worse. He stops when he's too winded to speak and goes still for a moment, looking down at the shaking teen on the floor.

He can still smell the cigarettes and beer. "Disgusting little brat." he growls, grabbing Bruce by the shirt again and hauling him into the backyard. He tosses him against the fence, ordering Bruce to place his hands on the wood, his back turned to the house while he reaches for the nearby garden hose.

 

Bruce is shaking, vision blurry with pain. It doesn't help that his father knocked his glasses off his face. He can hear his mother crying from the doorway. 

 

"You're so disgusting it's even making your mother cry!" His father snarls. 

 

"I'm sorry," Bruce's voice hitches. His jaw is swelling with pain, and he grimly hopes that it will bruise so someone will see it and call the police.

 

His father just growls and turns on the hose. The cold water hits Bruce's back, making the boy flinch and shake under the hard spray. His father hoses him down, soaking his back and head before grabbing Bruce's shoulder to turn him around to wash down his front. The water is cold and stings when it hits Bruce's new injuries but he can't complain or beg for forgiveness.

Once he's soaked his father grabs his face, forcing his mouth open to wash the scent away. He lifts the hose over Bruce's head and lets the water fill his mouth and nose, almost drowning his son before he finally tosses it aside and lets Bruce cough and gasp for air.

He leaves Bruce there, going back to the house and grabbing his wife's arm to drag her inside as well. He doesn't look back, just slams the door and locks it behind him.

 

Once he's gone, Bruce allows himself to cry. His lungs are burning and he's shaking like a leaf. His eyes are blurry, his body is numb (which is sweet relief from his aching chest) and the tears are hot on his face. But it's worth it. One freezing night and a couple of bruises are more than worth his time with Pepper.

 

He doesn't eat that night. His father keeps close inventory on the food in the house, so it would have done more harm than good if his mother snuck him dinner. She does bring him a towel though after her husband is asleep, under the pretense of doing a couple loads of laundry before she goes to bed. She dries him off as best she can, but it's already dark and he's already shivering through a fever. She tells him not to hesitate to yell for her if he really needs her, father be damned. He thanks her, but doesn't tell her that he would sooner freeze to death than give his father a reason to hit his mother. 


	5. Chapter 5

Bruce isn't in school on Monday. Pepper spends all morning looking for him, going to his locker and his classroom and just searching the halls when she can but there's no sign of him. Each passing period before lunch without a sighting makes her a little more nervous. Bruce's father is a scary guy and she's sure, though she has no proof, that he's done something to hurt Bruce because of how he must have smelled after being in her house.

There's still no sign of him by lunch time and Pepper can't stand it any longer. She doesn't go to her table but instead marches right up to Tony and the others, hoping they've heard something that will set her mind at ease.

"Bruce? Yeah he was here today. He was sick though, really sick, pneumonia or something, and went to the nurse." Tony tells her when she asks. He smirks a little adding, "Why are you so worked up? Missing him already, isn't that sweet guys?"

Pepper ignores him and hurries off, waving to her friends as she rushes to the nurses office, ready to beg for Bruce's forgiveness, only to find that his mother has already taken him home.

 

Bruce hopes his father won't be mad that he was sent home, but with a fever of 102 and shakes, he didn't have a choice. He's coughing up a storm, and breathing actually hurts, but he can't complain about any of it. His father will just say it's his fault anyway. 

 

Despite being sick, Bruce can't complain about spending the whole day alone with his mother. He doesn't feel afraid in his own house, for a change. She makes him tomato soup and two grilled cheese sandwiches, and he eats everything without hesitation or difficulty. 

 

His father comes home at his usual time and is furious that Bruce wasn't in school all day. He yells, saying it'sBruce's own fault he got sick and if he wasn't such a worthless piece of shit he wouldn't be in this position. He blames Bruce's mother for mollycoddling him and making the boy soft, for leaving work early to go get their useless son and bringing him home to reward him for breaking the rules. He smacks her but doesn't go any farther. He leaves her on the floor of Bruce's room to go get a drink for himself because he needs one if he's going to put up with them.

A few minutes later Pepper pulls up to the house, a stack of books and papers on the seat next to her. She hesitates a moment but she has to see Bruce. She has to know he's okay. So she gathers up the books and heads up the steps to ring the doorbell.

 

The door swings open to the sight of Bruce's father standing there, and upon seeing her, he crosses his arms. "What do you want?" He snaps. Pepper can see Bruce's mother in the other room with puffy eyes, holding a wet washcloth to her cheek, and Bruce is nowhere in sight. 

 

"Hello sir. Bruce wasn't in school for very long today so I brought over his schoolwork and homework. I didn't want him to fall behind." Pepper says, gesturing to the books in her arms. "Would it be alright if I gave them to him, sir?"

 

He looks like he's about to slam the door in her face. He's silent for a long time, but finally stands back to let her in. He takes her to Bruce's room, where he's snuggled, shivering, under several blankets, with a warm towel on his head. He smiles when he sees Pepper, but when he opens his mouth to greet her, he coughs. There's a light bruise on the edge of his jaw that wasn't there the last time Pepper saw him. 

 

"Bruce, you look terrible." pepper says, setting his books down on his dresser and taking his mother's seat next to his bed. She wants to apologize or ask about the bruise but she has a feeling if she says anything while his father can hear she'll only make matters worse. So instead she picks up the books again and starts explaining the homework, trying to convey her apologies through her tone and expression.

The bruise worries her and she spends more time than she should looking at it. It definitely looks like Bruce was hit by someone and his mother looked the same when Pepper saw her holding the washcloth to her face. But if she's wrong and she says something Bruce will hate her and his parents will probably never let her near him again.

Finally she can't drag out being there any more, having gone over all of the homework. Before she stands up she scribbles her phone number on a piece of paper, telling him to call any time if he needs help. Before she even has the chance to say goodbye Bruce's father is there, hurrying her back out the door.

 

 

Bruce is back in school the next day. He has a medical mask over his face. Bruce says his father made him wear it so he won’t cough on people, but Pepper knows it’s to hide the bruise on his face.

 

They hold their first tutoring session a couple days later, and despite still being a little sick, Bruce couldn’t be happier. He still isn’t very good with English, but the time with Pepper is a godsend. Every hour she’s at his place, after all, is another hour that his father won’t hurt him. He’d never hit Bruce if there was another person there to see and call the police, because he’d never risk going to prison and lose his favorite punching bag.

 

Another week draws to a close, Bruce’s cold (and the bruise) is gone, and not a single word of Pepper’s home got out to anyone at school. She could just kiss him for it. Her project is going well too, another thing she could kiss him for. In fact, the list of things she could kiss him for seems to grow daily, until they stop being real reasons, and instead are closer to “I could kiss him because he has nice lips.”

 

But as far as she knows, Bruce just wants to be friends. After all, she even heard a rumor from Tony that Bruce has a crush on Clint, which seems absurd since Bruce doesn’t treat Clint any differently than he treats anyone else, and besides, Tony has a penchant for making up stories. But nevertheless, she doesn’t want to make a pass at him if there is a chance he’s gay, because it’ll just bring up eleven different kinds of awkward that she doesn’t want to suffer through alongside all of her other problems.

 

Bruce is having his own internal dilemma as time passes. Prom grows closer by the day, and he still hasn’t asked Pepper. He wants to, oh how he wants to. The idea of Pepper dressed in some pretty, sparkly gown, with her hair all done up, just for Bruce – it makes him feel weak. But then again, anything Pepper does makes him feel weak. The way she applies lip gloss, the way her eyes crinkle when she smiles, her perfume, her eyelashes, her _freckles_. Bruce doesn’t want to say he’s in love because 1) he’s sixteen years old, 2) _she’s_ sixteen years old, and 3) he isn’t even quite sure what being in love feels like. But he does know that being around Pepper makes him happier than being around any other person in the world. Besides his mother, but she doesn’t count romantically.

 

And it is romantically. Bruce wants to kiss Pepper’s long fingers and brush her hair over her ears and kiss her on the corner of her lips when school is over. He wants to go down on one knee and serenade her on a balcony. He wants to go hiking with her and skiing, and rock climbing, and he wants to go to college with her and watch her grow and he needs to stop daydreaming during their lesson about their fucking marriage or he’s gonna lose it. She’s already looking at him funny.

 

“Bruce?” she says gently.

 

He shakes his head with a sheepish smile.

 

"You wrote the same sentence twice." She laughs, looking over at his paper. She takes it away and starts correcting his mistakes, chuckling to herself as she goes. "I didn't realize our sessions were boring you so much Bruce. I'll have to work harder to keep your attention in the future."

 

“You keep my attention fine,” Bruce says without hesitation. “You actually keep my attention a little too well,” he grins awkwardly. At which point his father came into the kitchen and he immediately stopped talking and started writing on another piece of paper.

 

Pepper can't keep herself from blushing and drops her eyes to the paper, marking up where Bruce could use some improvement. If she was a little braver she would write a note, asking him if he wanted to go out sometime. But she isn't that brave or willing to risk their friendship. So the bottom of the page is still empty when she hands it back.

 

As the days go on, Bruce learns little things about Pepper that he really enjoys hearing. He learns about how much she loves her little siblings, and about what she wants to major in when she goes to college. He learns what she wants to do for a living, what she wants to learn how to do. He finds out that Pepper isn’t actually her real name, much to his embarrassment, but actually a nickname that she got in the sixth grade when she got in trouble for having pepper spray in her purse on the first day. But he doesn’t think the name Virginia suits her very much, and she agrees that she likes it better when he calls her Pepper.

 

He learns that her favorite flower-shaped earrings are actually handed down from her grandmother. Or, rather, they were given to her mother, who was going to sell them when they “mysteriously vanished.” Her mother still doesn’t know that she is the one who took them, and had always assumed it was her boyfriend at the time, even though he swore up and down he “didn’t touch her goddamn earrings.” Pepper wasn’t sad that they broke up over it. They’re real diamonds set in real gold, even though they’re very tiny, and they suit her absolutely perfectly. Bruce wonders how much it would cost to find a tiny diamond flower on a gold chain for her birthday, but realizes that his father would never give him the money, and only boyfriends give girls jewelry for their birthday. And as much as Bruce wishes he could be Pepper’s boyfriend, he isn’t.

 

Pepper loves talking with Bruce. He listens to her when she talks about her dreams and all the things she wishes she could do when she leaves home. He doesn't try to guilt her into staying or make it seem like her dreams are impossible. He doesn't judge her by her family just like she doesn't judge him for his. He's kind and generous and he asks to know more, seeming almost eager for her to talk. She feels more comfortable around him than anyone else, even going so far as to leave her friends sometimes and sit with Bruce and the others at lunch.

She tries to get Bruce to talk about himself too. She urges him to open up about his wants and dreams. She learns that his mother is pretty much his favorite person in the world. She learns that he wants to be a doctor like her but his father wants him to become a scientist and Bruce is pretty sure that's what he'll end up doing. He tells her that he can't wait to leave for college and she thinks she knows why. But she never says anything, just waits hoping someday Bruce will say enough to confirm her suspicions.

Their time together means a lot to Pepper. Seeing him is the highlight of her day and she starts to wonder if maybe she's falling a little bit in love with him.

 

The deadline to purchase a couples ticket for a discount is drawing nearer and nearer, and Bruce fears he may have missed his window. Pepper probably already has a date anyway, she’s so beautiful, how could every guy in school not want to ask her?

 

He overhears her, a few lockers down, talking with her friends. He doesn’t mean to eavesdrop, but he hears them chatting about going down town that afternoon to pick out prom dresses, and invite her to come along. She gracefully declines, and they head off to class.

 

He sidles over to her, trying to make it seem like he didn’t overhear everything. “So, um, Pepper, the guys are making a bet between two people they think are going to ask you to prom, but uh, I don’t want to join the betting pool so, can I just ask who you’re going with?”

 

“Me? Oh, I’m not going with anyone. Nobody’s asked me,” Pepper shrugs with a little smile, feeling a little fluttery.

 

“N-No one?” Bruce’s eyes widen, but then the bell rings, Pepper excuses herself, and hurries to class. Even after the bell stopped, Bruce’s ears are still ringing.

 

 _No one_. No one has asked her. He still has a chance. He’s going to do it, he has to try. He’ll ask her at lunch. He’ll march right over her table and - ! Well, no. He’ll walk over, probably sheepishly, and ask to speak to her alone, probably. But he’ll still do it. He feels nervous even thinking about it. He has until lunch to work up the nerve.

 

At lunch Pepper blows off her friends, feeling a little uncomfortable around them. They're all talking about prom and dresses and while she chose not to go she's not interested in sitting around and pretending to be excited for them.

So she joins Bruce and his friends who seem much more interested in how interested everyone else is in going to prom than in going themselves. Natasha is has chosen to go for exactly ten minutes to show off her dress and Bucky in his suit before leaving to get very, very drunk.

"What about you, Steve?" Pepper asks. "You renting a tux, doing up your hair, letting Tony bring you flowers, the whole bit?"

 

“Not renting,” Steve chuckles. “My father’s going to let me wear his old tux. It’s in really good condition, and it’s really classy.”

 

“I’ve seen it,” Clint nods. “It’s brown _suede_. People are going to be rubbing up against you all night just because your suit is so damn soft.”

 

“And what about _you_ Bruce? Who are _you_ going with?” Tony asks exaggeratedly, jerking his head towards Pepper, but she doesn’t see.

 

“Shut up, Tony,” Bruce clears his throat and blushes. It’s now or ever. “Um, Pepper, could I, um, talk to you for a minute? Um, alone?”

 

And her stomach drops. Because if this is what she thinks (hopes, dreads, fears?) it is, she might just cry. But she nods and follows until they’re in the hallways just outside the lunch room.

 

“This morning, you said you weren’t going with anyone and, um, well I’m not going with anyone either,” Bruce says, tugging at the ends of his sleeves and generally avoiding eye contact, afraid he’ll pass out at any moment. “So um, I mean if you wanted to go, um, with me? I-I’m free.”

 

"Oh, oh wow." Pepper says, nervously pulling at her ponytail. "Bruce I'd love to. I really would. I was hoping you'd ask me but so much time went by and you didn't and this morning Obadiah Stane asked me and I said yes. I'd really rather go with you though."

 

“Obadiah… Stane?” Bruce repeats. “But he’s an ass! Oh, oh, I’m sorry, that was mean,” he groans and looks down at his feet, suddenly feeling sick. “But um, no, um, that’s okay. I mean you probably already got tickets and I mean, my dad probably wasn’t going to let me go anyway so, um, it’s not a problem. I’ll see you later, I just remembered some homework that I need to ask a teacher about.”

 

He scurries away quickly before Pepper can say anything else, his face heating up red with shame.

 

Pepper's tempted to go after him. She wants to explain that she really likes him and if he had asked her the day before she would have said yes in a heartbeat and would have been excited to go. But she's already said yes to Stane, because she didn't think she had any other choice.

But Bruce doesn't want to hear that and almost as soon as he's out of sight Obadiah is there, putting his arm around her waist and leading her inside to introduce her to his friends. She tries to look back over her shoulder but Obadiah is big. Really big. As the most successful member of the wrestling team he's guaranteed to be. So when she turns all she sees is Obadiah's shoulder.


	6. Chapter 6

Tony is very unhappy to learn that Pepper is going to prom with Obie. “You know what he did to me, Pepper, you traitor,” he says, with something close to real hurt in his voice.

 

Obadiah was Tony’s best friend all the way up until sixth grade, before he found out that he’d been put up by his parents to be Tony’s friend so they could get in close with Stark Industries. Tony had been furious that Stane had never actually considered him a friend, and declared they would never speak again. Well, he declared that they were “arch enemies” but high schoolers don’t really have arch enemies, so they were just ex-friends. Ex-not-friends.

 

“I’m sorry, Tony, I just didn’t want to go alone or have to stay home,” she sighs. She really wishes Bruce had asked her earlier. Tony says he’s not talking to her until after Prom is over, and that shouldn’t hurt her as much as it does.

 

Between her mom guilting her more heavily than usual, Paul full-on groping her ass twice in a week and a half, and Bruce avoiding eye contact with her, she’s quickly coming apart at the seams. She doubts anyone notices though. She’s very good at maintaining her own personal chaos.

 

Even Steve isn't talking to her, though he at least seems apologetic. She stops visiting their table at lunch and usually ends up sitting with Obadiah, who likes to have his hands on her as much as possible, not caring that she told him it makes her uncomfortable. Her study sessions with Bruce are mostly silent now, him writing or reading and her grading. There are no jokes, no secret glances when his father is nearby, no more talks about college and what they want to do with their lives.

Some days Pepper doesn't want to get out of her car. She takes her time going home, just driving in circles, trying not to cry because even she doesn't want to see her own weakness. They're just people after all. Friends once, sure, but obviously they didn't care that much in the first place if they won't even give her the benefit of the doubt and stay with her when she needs them. They don't matter.

She doesn't really believe it, but it feels good to think it for a little while.

She starts spending a lot of time looking for ways out of her rut. When she's home she hides in her room so she doesn't have to face Paul or her mother. At school she rushes back and forth between classes and throws herself into her extracurriculars so she doesn't have to talk to anyone unnecessarily. Both of her jobs have mostly ground to a halt so she isn't even bringing in the money she once was to help get her into college.

Something needs to change.

Pepper finds that something through her little sister. Leslie comes to her in tears one afternoon because the boys in her class have been giving her a hard time about her now much shorter hair. In a moment of inspiration and solidarity Pepper takes the scissors from her mother's untouched sewing kit and cuts off almost a foot and a half of her own gorgeous strawberry blond ponytail, leaving it short enough to just barely brush her shoulders.

Looking at herself in the mirror she feels a little bit more like the old Pepper again.

 

Her haircut is met with mixed emotions. Most of the girls tell her it’s such a shame that she cut off so much of her lovely hair, and Obadiah says “you looked prettier with it longer” but he doesn’t dump her for it as much as she wish he would.

 

She was almost beginning to regret her haircut when a third girl in a row said she looked better before, when Bruce suddenly takes her arm in the middle of the hall and leans in so close she can feel his words on her ear as much as hear them as he says, “ _I think it’s really pretty_ ,” and releases her once again, disappearing into the flow of students going in the opposite direction away from her.

 

She has to duck into the girl's bathroom so no one will see her start to cry. She hadn't fully realized how much she's been missing Bruce until that moment and hearing him compliment her, instead of making her feel better, just makes her feel more alone than ever. But she quickly dries her eyes, uses a little more concealer to cover the red splotches on her cheeks and heads back out to class, her head held as high as she can manage.

 

 

 

 

Bruce’s personal hell starts a day later, when his mother tells him that she’s been chosen, out of all the doctors in the hospital, to attend a doctor’s conference for three weeks in Massachusetts. Which means three weeks alone with his father. He dreads the very idea. Suddenly asking to go to a private boarding school seems like a much better idea. His father is always harder on him when his mother isn’t around, because (Bruce expects) he must love her _somewhat_ , and the fact that her eyes are on him while he beats her son stays his hand a small amount. Bruce will have to be extra-careful.

 

“It’s only a plane ride away,” his mother says tearily, holding him tightly in the airport as she waits to go through security. The last time he’ll see her for three weeks. “I’ll call you _every night_ , I promise.” She kisses his head, and waves goodbye all the way through security. Bruce is completely silent in the back seat of the car as his father drives him home.

 

His father starts drinking as soon as they get back to the house, yelling for Bruce to get dinner ready. Mrs. Banner gone means Bruce has to be sure that all his father's meals are on time, that the cleaning is done and there's always plenty to drink. He has to keep up with his studies and handle all the work his mother does around the house or his father gets mad.

The first day with his mother gone goes fairly smoothly. The second day his father throws a beer bottle at his head but doesn't do anything when Bruce ducks. By the third day though, he's started up a litany of insults that never seem to cease, his favorite being "You worthless son of a bitch" which seems to come up every time he looks at Bruce.

 

Bruce tries to ignore it. He even sneaks a call to Pepper’s cell in the middle of the night after his father is asleep (he knows Pepper will be up studying) on the landline, since that doesn’t record phone call history like his cell phone does. He realizes halfway through its ringing that he has no excuse to be calling her, but she picks up before he can hang up. He quickly stammers his way through an explanation that he’d just had a horrible nightmare and he was feeling very afraid. Pepper prompted him to talk about it, so he made up a story about how he’d been chased by a monster in his dream that probably represented all of his stress. She listened, he thanked her, and then they hung up. It didn’t help much, but it was nice while it lasted.

 

His father never found out about the call. He’s glad for it, too, because he’d surely have had his nose broken. The only escape from hell with his father is school, and his nightly phone calls with his mother. His dad won’t let the calls last longer than half an hour, and he always has to be in the room to listen in, but Bruce doesn’t mind. It’s calming just to hear his mother’s voice.

 

But one day – six days after his mother left – his father is in a particularly bad mood, and less than two minutes into the call, he grabs the phone away from him and slams it down on the receiver.

 

“You’ve got homework to do and she should stop calling every fucking night, it’s a waste of fucking money,” he snarls.

 

“Hey!” Bruce cries before he can even stop it, he’s so startled and flustered and frustrated.

 

"You got something to say? You gonna defend her you little shit? Gonna say she has a right to interrupt your work and keep spending my money, you little son of a bitch?" he father asks, advancing on the teen.

 

“Don’t talk about my mother that way!” Bruce hollers before he can even think about how fantastically stupid that just was. He’s drawn himself up to his full height as well, and he’s breathing hard, adrenaline like fire in his veins. He’s never once stood up to his father before, not once. Well, not since he was a toddler and he begged his daddy to stop hitting him, and his daddy only hit him harder. He thought that was the only lesson he ever needed. He’s wrong.

 

“Excuse me?” his father says, voice eerily calm.

 

“I said,” Bruce takes a deep breath. “Don’t _talk_ about her like that.” he’s dizzy with fright, and the second his father makes a move, he’s going to try running. He’s never run before, but if he can get out to the street he can run somewhere where he’ll be safe. His father won’t grab him in the street, not if people can see him.

 

His father pulls his arm back, ready to deliver a blow but Bruce doesn't give him the chance. He slips around him and bolts for the front door, hoping to make it to the safety of the street. He hears his father in the hall behind him but just keeps running. He gets to the front room, almost to the door, thinking for a moment that this is it. He'll get out and be free and he can call the cops. Finally.

But he doesn't get the chance. Almost to the door a large hand grabs a fistful of his hair and yanks him back, making Bruce's neck and head ache. The teen tries to cry out, thinking maybe he can alert a neighbor but his father throws him back into the coffee table and the air rushes from his lungs on impact, leaving him voiceless as his father descends upon him.

After that there's a flurry of fists and feet, hard punches, stinging slaps and kicks that will leave bruises for days all over Bruce's body. There's nothing Bruce can do but curl up, cover his head and throat, and wait it out, whimpering to himself while he prays for his father to tire soon.

 

Mr. Banner finally stands back to admire his work, shoving Bruce in the ribs again with his foot, and Bruce feels a swell of horror when he hears the jangling of his father removing his belt. Then suddenly there’s the whipping sting of that thin strip of leather all over his neck, back, arms and face. His lip splits open and his eyes water and his glasses break, and he doesn’t even try to hold back his sobs.

 

He sees once by the light of an overturned lamp that his father is grinning. Bruce knows he’s been wanting to beat Bruce to death for years, and he might finally get his wish today. He curls his hands over his head and sobs as the blows keep coming.

 

He doesn’t know how long they last, but his father finally steps back, breathing almost as hard as Bruce, and fixes his hair, and puts his belt back into his pants loops. Bruce is bleeding fairly heavily, and he whimpers on every exhale.

 

There's a little jingling sound, almost like bells, and then something hard hits Bruce in the side. A ring of keys.

"Take your car." his father orders. "Drive it up a tree or a light pole. I'm not getting in trouble over a little son of a bitch like you."

 

Bruce hurts in places he doesn’t even know he has. “You want me to crash my car?” he says numbly, his voice thick with blood in his mouth.

 

“Yes, I want you to crash your _fucking_ car,” his father spits on him and roots through his pockets to find his cell phone, which he then smashes on the ground so Bruce can’t call the police when he leaves the house. “And I’ll be watching you do it, so don’t think you can drive away, or your mother will get the beating for it when she comes home.”   
  
Bruce whimpers and uses the coffee table to pull himself up. The sight of his blood on the ground is nauseating, and one of his arms hurts so bad he can barely breathe through the pain. It’s undoubtedly broken. But hey, if he’s going to be in a car accident, maybe he’ll be in the hospital for a few days, away from his father. If he’s lucky, the man won’t even visit.

 

His father shoves him back to the ground twice just to watch him struggle to a stand before he finally allows the bleeding boy to limp past, half-dragging one ankle behind him. He pushes the door open with his good hand and climbs into his car. Sticking the key into the ignition, he turns the engine over, and looks up through the window into his father’s eyes. He swallows hard and pulls out of the driveway backwards, and drives slowly to the end of the road before making a three-point turn. He can see the giant oak tree across the street from his house, the perfect thing to crash into. He starts going a steady twenty miles an hour, plenty to trash the front end of his car, but as he makes his way down the street, grief starts to well up in him.

 

He begins to cry as he hits the halfway point between the end of the street and the tree, his final destination. He hurts so bad. Not just physically. His mother probably thinks he hung up on her, probably hates him for it. He barely talks to Pepper anymore, his friends are upset with him over the fact that he let Pepper go so easily, his father _hates_ him.

 

Hate isn’t a strong enough word. His father tried to kill him. And if this crash doesn’t kill him, his father probably still will one day. There’s no way he can make it through two more years of this. He pushes on the gas harder.

 

The car speeds up. Thirty miles an hour, forty, fifty. The tree is a blur. The crash is deafening.

 

 

 

===

 

 

 

Pepper is just finishing putting Leslie and Adam to bed while trying to ignore the way Paul is leering at her when her phone rings. No one calls her any more except Obadiah so she's surprised to see her mother's name on the caller I.D.

"Mom? Aren't you supposed to be working? Are you alright?" she asks when she answers the call, knowing her mother wouldn't call while at work if it wasn't something important. She just hopes there isn't something wrong with the baby.

Until her mother tells her what happened. Until she hears about the car crash and Bruce being rushed to the hospital. She saw him, heard his name, she’s just a janitor but janitors can still hear things. Pepper would give anything for it to be something else then, even complications with the baby.

She doesn't bother saying goodbye or telling Paul where she's going. She jumps into the car and starts calling any of Bruce's friends she can reach, starting with Steve because Tony won't answer. Normally a good driver Pepper wouldn't be able to remember the number of laws she breaks on the way to the hospital if she tried. She just wants to get there fast and she does. Her mother, still on duty, tells her that she overheard the nurses saying Bruce would need surgery and that he won't be out for a few hours if everything goes well. Pepper hugs her.

She waits by the front doors for the others to arrive, not caring that she still reeks like her house and is still in her trailer park clothes. That doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. They don't even like her anyway so why should she bother to pretend. What's important right now is that they're all there for Bruce.

 

Steve, Clint and Tony all show, followed soon after by Thor, but Natasha never arrives. Bruce and Natasha have never been very close anyway. They all hug and cry a little, they don’t comment on the smell or Pepper’s clothes, and Tony forgets his anger. Pepper cries half because of Bruce, half because she feels a little bit better now that they’re being nice to her again.

 

They fall asleep in the lobby of the hospital, all puppy piled onto one couch to spare room for anyone else, Pepper smack dab in the middle. A nurse comes by later, it’s morning, but they don’t even care about school. They’re allowed to see Bruce.

 

His left arm is in a cast, his right foot is in a brace, as well as his neck, and there’s some kind of brace on his back. He’s got a tube taped down his throat, and his face is such a mess of bruises and cuts that he’s barely recognizable. Pepper immediately gives a whine, and Steve holds onto her shoulders gently to steady her.

 

“God, Bruce,” Tony falls into one of the chairs beside the bed. “How could this even happen? He’s such a good driver. How did they find him, does anyone know? Was anyone else involved?”

 

“His car was found wrapped around a tree,” Thor says with a sigh. “I asked a nurse when I left to use the restroom a few hours ago. There was no one else involved. He doesn’t even have any alcohol or substances of any kind in his blood.”

 

"It was his father." Pepper says, still leaning on Steve for support. She's shaky but her eyes are steady and fierce, angrier than she's been in years and more than ready to give the man a taste of her pepper spray.

But the others don't look nearly as convinced. If anything, they look like they never would have considered the idea. They're all looking at her like she suddenly sprouted a third head and Pepper realizes she might be the only one who has ever been to Bruce's house and seen how controlling his father is, or noticed the bruises on Bruce's arms and neck.

"I've met his father. He threatens to lock Bruce out of the house every night. And I've seen bruises that Bruce tries to keep covered up." she tells them. "I don't have any proof or I would have gone to the police."

 

They all gape at her. “Bruce’s dad’s a _hitter?_ ” Steve says, as though he’s been personally scandalized by the idea.

 

“No way, Bruce would have said something!” Tony says, looking over at Bruce like he hopes he’ll wake up right then and explain the whole thing.

 

"Don't be stupid Tony. People don't talk about things like that. Especially not people as sweet and skittish as Bruce. He's too scared to report something, no matter how much of an asshole his father is." Pepper snaps, forgetting to censor herself in her anger.

 

Tony flinches away from her with a frown.

 

“Pepper, come on, don’t be mean,” Steve urges her gently to sit down, even though she’s as restless as a march hare. “We can’t assume it’s his father without proof.”

 

 "I know! I know that, I've been doing it since Bruce started helping me with my project. I've keep trying not to jump to conclusions but I'm sure it's his fault, I'm sure of it," she says, beginning to sob because she has no other outlet for her feelings.

 

They each take turns holding her and rubbing her shoulders while she cries herself out.

 

Hours pass. They don’t leave. They can’t leave, they’re scared to leave. As if by being there, they are the only things keeping Bruce alive. They aren’t told anything by the doctors, even when they ask questions. The nurses half-heartedly try to get them to leave, but eventually give up. Tony and Steve’s parents (Clint is in a foster home that doesn’t give a shit and Thor’s father is back in Norway) allow them to stay, but want them home by midnight.

 

Around five thirty PM, a man comes into the room, who looks quite like a very large version of Bruce, with very strong-looking forearms. Pepper sees a little bit of blood under his fingernail, but doesn’t say anything. His face is hard and unforgiving as he looks over the boy in his hospital bed.

 

“I’ll bet the lot of you didn’t even go to school, did you?” he says gruffly. “Slackers.”

 

A doctor appears a moment later, and Steve grabs Tony by the shoulder to keep him from advancing on the man in anger.

 

“Can you kids please leave the room?” the doctor asks gently, and they don’t have a choice but to leave the room. Tony suddenly grabs a cup from the water cooler and puts the wide end against the door, and his ear on the narrow end, and shushes his friends when they ask him what he’s doing.

 

He listens quietly, eyes squinted. “ _The doctor says they don’t know if Bruce is going to wake up_ ,” he whispers to his friends. “ _Says he suffered severe head trauma… might be a vegetable for the rest of his life._ ”

 

“No,” Pepper whimpers.

 

Tony goes back to listening, occasionally whispering tidbits, but then suddenly his eyes go wide, he stands, and throws the door open without hesitation, and shouts, “No, you _CAN’T!_ ”

 

Bruce’s father is standing with the doctor, a clip board and pen in his hand, and he’s currently signing the paper on the board, not even deterred by the door slamming open.

 

“I already have,” Mr. Banner says before pushing past Tony and walking down the hall.

 

"What did he do?" Pepper asks, grabbing the doctor's arm before he too can leave. "Tell me what he just signed! Please!"

 

“Pardon me, I’m on duty,” the doctor says, shrugging her off, and also leaves down the hall.

 

“Tony, what did he sign?!” Pepper asks breathlessly.

 

Tony is breathing hard, and slowly turns to look at his friends. “He just… signed a paper saying that… if Bruce doesn’t wake up in a week… they’re going to cut life support.” His voice wavers weakly at the end, and he falls back into the chair to cover his face.

 

"No. He can't do that." Pepper says fiercely, too angry to start crying again. Instead she reaches into her purse and tosses her cell phone to Steve. "You call Mrs. Banner. Her number is in there. Tell her what's going on."

"And what are you doing?" Clint asks, looking caught between going with her and trying to block her path in case she does something incredibly stupid.

Which is exactly what she's planning. She looks up at him with a nasty smile as she pulls her pepper spray out of her bag. "I'm going to go give that bastard a piece of my mind."

 

“No way,” Clint does block the door. “If he is a hitter that means he’s dangerous. If you approach him he could hurt you.”

 

"That's why I have the pepper spray." she says. "Now move."

 

“If you’re going then I’m coming with you. If he makes a move to hurt you and the pepper spray doesn’t work, I’ll help. Don’t even try to talk me out of it.”

 

“I’ll make the call. You two do what you need to do,” Steve says. It’s a wonder he’s not trying to talk them out of potentially pepper spraying a man.

 

Pepper nods and she and Clint head down the hall but by the time they reach the end it's clear it's too late. They took too much time talking and he's already gone.

She sends Clint back to Bruce's room while she goes out to her car to sit and think for a while. She comes back to the room, changed into more appropriate clothes, hoping that it will have all been a bad dream or she's made it worse in her head. But there's Bruce on the bed, braces on his neck and back and that damn cast and all the machines and she feels sick. She sits back down and starts crying, sobbing so hard she sets off her asthma and has to scramble for her inhaler before she ends up with her own room.

 

“I called, and Bruce’s mother is on her way back already,” Steve says. “She’ll be here in less than a day. That’s more than enough time for her to overwrite the paperwork. She says she’s not even going to go home, and I offered her my home as a safe place to go to if she needs. If her husband is abusive, this might be the push it takes for her to make a statement against him.”

 

"You believe me now, don't you? I mean what kind of man just writes off his son like that?" Pepper asks as if she doesn't know. She's seen the bruises and she's seen how Bruce looks at his father, as if he's terrified to do anything that might anger him. And she knows how little some people care about their kids.

 

They all murmur in agreement. Tony is almost as distraught as Pepper is, maybe even more. Obadiah is completely unsympathetic, and she stops at once trying to get any compassion out of him. She’s probably going to dump him. She can’t think of any reason not to, except that she’d rather wait a little while until this whole thing blows over with Bruce so that she doesn’t have to deal with Obie’s bad attitude with being dumped at the same time as all this.

 

They do have to leave eventually, but they make a meeting with Bruce’s mom to meet back up at 7 PM the next day. Not a single person is late. Natasha still doesn’t show.

 

Bruce’s mother is a tired but lovely lady, and she has Bruce’s eyes and his smile. Or rather, Bruce has hers. But they aren’t seeing much of her smile as she overwrites the paperwork. She talked about it with his friends, and they all came to the agreement that if Bruce still hasn’t woken up after ten months, it’s time to let him die. It’s horrible to think about, and for now all they can do is have hope that he’ll wake up.

 

“Thank you so much for talking to your parents about me staying with you, but I don’t think I’ll want to leave the hospital much,” she smiles.

 

“Well, our door is open to you, Mrs. Banner,” Steve smiles.

 

“Please, call me Rebecca. All of you, please, call me Rebecca. I really… don’t want to be called Mrs. Banner anymore,” she gives a very sad smile.

 

"Rebecca, will you call me if anything changes? Please?" Pepper begs, taking a step forward. "One call, day or night and I'll be here in ten minutes. I want to be here for him."

 

“Absolutely,” Rebecca hands Pepper her phone so she can program her number into it. She smoothes her hand over Pepper’s hair, and kisses her cheek. “I only wish we could know what happened – ”

 

She suddenly gasps. The room goes dead silent, except for the steady click of Bruce’s respirator.

 

“Miss Rebecca?” Steve says after a moment.

 

“ _A dash cam_ ,” Rebecca whispers. “My husband, he installed a dash cam into Bruce’s car! I’ll be back in a couple hours, I’m going to go to the impound and see if I can get the footage.”

 

"I'll stay here with him." Pepper says, returning to her usual seat at Bruce's bedside. "I hope you find something." She looks up at Mrs. Banner and she knows she doesn't have to explain. They both know she means something that will prove Mr. Banner was involved somehow.

 

Rebecca leaves, and everyone practically holds their breath. They all take turns holding Bruce’s non-casted hand, and there is very little conversation. Whoever isn’t holding Bruce’s hand is holding Pepper’s, and promising her that they’ll all get through this.


	7. Chapter 7

Five hours later, Rebecca returns with a VHS tape concealed in her purse. She closes the door to Bruce’s room and wishes there was a lock, but Thor just leans against the door to prevent anyone from entering without first alerting him.

 

With the curtains drawn over the window into the hall, Rebecca inserts the tape. There’s a few moments of static before the camera comes to life along with the engine, and the porch is illuminated with the headlights of Bruce’s car. His father is standing in the front door with his arms crossed. There’s blood on both of his hands. Rebecca whimpers.

 

Bruce can be heard whimpering and crying as he pulls out backwards from the driveway, and both of Rebecca’s hands are being held now, by whom, she doesn’t care. She listens to her son cry and sob as he drives down the street, and then turns. His car speeds up, and then faster, and Bruce’s crying intensifies, and right before he hits the tree he’s speeding for, she has to look away. The footage turns to static, and Clint quickly turns it off. Rebecca breaks down into sobs.

 

Pepper goes to her and they hold each other, crying on each other's shoulders. Pepper still can't believe it. Poor, sad, hurting Bruce. A few weeks ago he might have come to her but because she'd chosen stupid Obadiah Stane he hadn't wanted to. He'd chosen to drive his car up a fucking tree rather than ask for help. He must have felt so alone, even more than she has.

Thinking about it like that only makes her cry harder. She would have been there for him if she could. But she wasn't and now they might lose him altogether.

 

They’re patient. Somehow Mr. Banner finds out that Rebecca came home early, and he’s absolutely furious. He shouts at her in the hospital until he’s escorted out. She looks numb to it.

 

“He can’t do anything to us here, baby,” Pepper overhears her whisper to Bruce when she thinks everyone else is asleep around them. She’s stroking the back of her son’s hand and crying softly.

 

Days pass. Four turns into five into six, and on the eighth day, during school, Pepper gets a phone call.

 

“He’s awake,” Rebecca’s voice is thick with tears of joy. “My baby is awake. You should tell the others.”

 

Pepper runs out of class. She's never left class before but she doesn't care. She runs through the halls, bursting into class rooms to tell the others. They all leave immediately, following her out to the parking lot and jumping into their various cars, damning the consequences. They're at the hospital in fifteen minutes, forcing their way past nurses to get into Bruce's room, Pepper in the lead.

 

Bruce’s eyes are open but he looks a little hazy when everyone (even Natasha) comes into the room. He smiles vaguely, but his eyes are focused solidly on Pepper.

 

“Hey, guys,” he says with a weak smile, his voice hoarse. Rebecca is holding tightly onto his unbroken hand, tears streaking her face. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

 

Pepper smiles and starts to cry, wishing she could run forward and hug Bruce as tightly as she possibly can. Instead she hurries to his side and kneels beside his bed, crying into the sheets.

"I thought you might die Bruce. God don't you ever do that to me again!"

 

“I didn’t do it _to_ you,” Bruce says softly, looking away sheepishly.

 

“He won’t tell me why he ran into the tree,” Rebecca says with a sob. “He insists it was an accident.”

 

“It… it _was_ an accident,” Bruce says. He accidentally had a suicidal moment for a split second, and that’s all it took to slam on the gas pedal. He regrets it, that makes it count as an accident.

 

"Bruce, no. Tell us the truth please." Pepper begs. "If you tell us we can help you. If you just tell us what happened we can get the police involved and you'll be okay."

 

Bruce swallows. He thinks it over. If the police are called, they still won’t be able to do anything. They don’t have any solid proof, it just looks like Bruce tried to kill himself. He saw the footage, and as much as he wished there was real proof, there isn’t. The blood on his father’s hands can easily be mistaken for shadows. And if the police come and go, his father will just be more enraged than usual. They’re already in deep shit as it is, with his mother avoiding going home for eight days.

 

“No, it… it was an accident,” he says.

 

For a second Pepper looks ready to slap him but it passes quickly, replaced with a reluctant nod. "Okay. If that's what you want, okay. But I'll find a way to help you, I promise. I'll do something."

 

“Please,” he lets go of his mother’s hand to grab hers. “Please, n-no. There’s… there’s nothing. I don’t want you getting involved.”

 

“Wow, it’s like we aren’t even here,” Tony says, crossing his arms. Bruce’s eyes flick up to him for a second before they flick right back down to Pepper.

 

“Please, Pepper, it isn’t your responsibility. I’m not… I’m just… I’m your friend, I’m not like, we’re not married, we’re not even d-dating, it’s not your responsibility to look after me,” Bruce says. “Please, _please_ , don’t get involved.”

 

"Alright. Alright fine." Pepper says, standing up. She doesn't let go of his hand but her tears stop abruptly. Her usual composure slides back into place with ease, just like she's trained it to. "That's fine. You've got a lot of homework to catch up on you know. I'll bring it by tomorrow."

 

She leaves shortly after. Bruce tries not to cry, he tries to focus his attention on his other friends, but he knows he did something wrong. He knows Pepper wants to help him, but he isn’t willing to let her get hurt over this.


	8. Chapter 8

Bruce is kept in the hospital for three more days before he’s released. Steve offers to let them stay in his place, but they insist that everything is fine, and Rebecca drives him home. They stop in the driveway and exchange looks of nervousness.

 

“I’m going to talk to him in the doorway,” she says. “I’m going to ask for a divorce. You’re going to wait right here in the car, okay sweetie? And then we’re going to a hotel.”

 

Bruce would nod, but he’s still wearing a neck brace. His neck isn’t broken, but his spine is a little bit off kilter, and any radical neck movements could potentially paralyze him. So he just makes a small noise of confirmation in his throat, and watches with dread as she walks up to the front door, and uses her key to open it. He hears her call to her husband, but doesn’t go inside. Bruce’s father appears after only a moment, and to his horror, he grabs her by the arm and the last thing he can hear is her cry out as she’s yanked into the house, and the door slams shut.

 

“Mom!” Bruce cries, struggling to get out of the car. He holds his weight on his good foot and holds his breath to try and hear anything. He doesn’t hear anything breaking, he doesn’t hear any shouting. He’s icy with fear. He thinks about calling Pepper, but doesn’t. He said he didn’t want her involved.

 

He limps up to the porch and tries to peer through the door’s window, but the curtains are drawn. He can’t see a thing through any of the thick curtains that cover the front windows. Suddenly the door opens and he’s eye-to-chest with his father. “No,” he tries to say, tries to take a step back, but he’s pulled in as well. The next thing he sees is his mother handcuffed to the front stair railing, a small wound bleeding on the side of her head, and a gag in her mouth.

 

“Think you can just fucking leave whenever you want, do you?” his father says as he kicks Bruce to the ground, and he can do nothing but sprawl. “Well, now you’re never _ever_ leaving again. _Either_ of you. I spent a lot of money putting an alarm system in this house that’ll go off and alert me if you try to leave, and only I have the code. I’m having the locks changed tomorrow. You can say hello to your new home school teacher, _me_.”

 

Bruce just pants on the ground as he looks up at his mother, and they share expressions of horror. His father has gone completely insane.

 

“You can’t do this,” Bruce says tiredly. “You can’t do this, you can’t treat us like animals!”

 

"Shut up!" His father shouts, lifting him up and backhanding him across the face. "You and your bitch mother belong to me. She signed up for this when she married me and you're my kid. I can do whatever the fuck I want with you and if I say you're not leaving, you're not leaving, got it?"

He throws Bruce to the ground again, the injured boy falling with no means of slowing or easing the blow. Behind his father Rebecca screams, reaching out for her son.

"Shut up bitch!" Mr. Banner shouts, whirling around to hit her hard enough to crack her head against the stair banister she's chained to.

 

She moans weakly, and Bruce wishes he wasn’t so hurt because he would launch himself at his father right now if he could.

 

“Don’t hit her!” Bruce shouts.

 

“Hit me!” Rebecca screeches. “Don’t you fucking touch him!”

 

And they look at one another as they realize they’ve put their deranged captor in a very unusual position of not knowing whether to piss off his wife by hitting Bruce, or anger his son by hitting his wife.

 

"Both of you, shut up!" he says, choosing to hit his wife again because she's closer. Neither of them is going anywhere soon, he can hit Bruce again any time he wants. He starts taking off his belt again, still glaring down at his wife as he pulls it through the loops. "I'm giving the orders here! You'll listen and only speak when you're told to, understand?"

 

Bruce feels dizzy, and he drops his face to the floor so he doesn’t have to watch his mother cringe and shy away from the belt. He can still hear her sob, he can hear the leather hit her skin, but at least he doesn’t have to watch it.

 

He doesn’t wait for permission to stand, he drags himself to the front drawer and starts to haul himself up. Maybe he can hobble to find something to protect himself with, but he doubts it. He would have to pass his father to get to the kitchen, and they don’t have anything else weapon like except for cooking knives.

 

So he just leans against the chest of drawers and covers his face with his free hand and cries quietly.

 

Eventually Bruce’s father gets the house phone, as well as his straight razor, and forces her to dial Pepper’s number with the blade pressed to Bruce’s throat. And so help him, she’d better not fucking stutter.

 

“Hello?” Pepper answers her phone after seeing the caller ID is Bruce’s house. She’s hopeful, and when she hears Rebecca’s voice, she instantly relaxes.

 

“Hello, sweetie,” Rebecca says, forcing herself to sound upbeat. “My husband and I have been talking with Bruce, and we all agree that he’s going to be taken out of school to be homeschooled here, by us. We’re very concerned about his wellbeing, and the fact that he attempted suicide, so we’re going to keep him home for a while. You’re one of his closest friends, so I was hoping you could spread the word to his other friends.”

 

"Oh." Pepper says sadly. "Yeah, I can do that. I'm sorry you feel that way, we'll all miss him." She'll miss him. She'll miss him so much it'll hurt but she can't say that. As Bruce pointed out, they aren't anything but friends. "Thank you for telling me. Have a nice night Rebecca." She doesn't wait for a goodbye before hanging up.

 

Rebecca hangs up the phone with her free hand, the other still cuffed to the stairs. “There, it’s done,” she whimpers. “Please, please, let him go.”

 

Bruce’s father pushes him, hard, He almost falls, but catches himself on the stair railing. They embrace, crying quietly. Bruce’s father spits on them and goes to get a drink.

 

The locks are changed out the next day. Bruce’s mother was moved to the upstairs bathroom, chained into the bathtub, so that she wouldn’t be seen. Bruce’s father made light conversation with the locksmiths, they could even hear him laughing downstairs.

 

“I could go scream for the lock-man to call the police,” Bruce whispers to his mother.

 

“No, baby, no,” she whispers back, cradling his head to her chest. “He’ll just think you’re a rebelling kid, and your father will hurt you bad. Just stay here with me, baby, we’ll get through this. I promise, we’ll find a way.”

 

Bruce doesn’t believe her. He doesn’t want to be stuck here forever.

 

The next few days are the worst of Bruce’s life. He stops thinking of the man as his father, and starts believing that he’s some kind of monster. He thinks his eyes have changed color – no, he’s certain. In low lights, his father’s eyes look green. They’ve always been brown. But that might be the head injury.

 

He’s pushed or kicked every single time he’s near his father, and he’s forced to nail every single window shut with only one hand. He hobbles around on his brace, and he can’t wait until ten days pass and he can get out of it and start limping without sounding like a jolly great pirate, thumping around with a peg leg.

 

Mr. Banner catches Rebecca trying to sneak a cookie for the two of them to share, and in order to punish them both, he hands Bruce his belt and forces him to lash his mother ten times, saying that if he doesn’t do it, then Mr. Banner will, and it’ll hurt a lot more. Bruce cries and apologies the whole way through, but Rebecca doesn’t make a sound.

 

At three days Bruce thinks he's starting to lose his mind. Sometimes, at night, he swears he hears someone whispering to him, telling him he can make it better. During the day when he's hiding from his father or trying to help his mother it's easier to ignore but when it gets quiet he knows it's there.

Other things happen too. He ends up in rooms he didn't mean to go into. Time passes oddly, sometimes too quickly, sometimes dragging out for eternities. There's a ringing in his ears and that damn voice. Telling him to run away or hide here or hit back, He wonders if its a by product of being hit so many times or something, some kind of madness brought on by the hunger that gnaws away at him constantly. Maybe he's not alone and his mother is hearing things too. But she never says anything so he keeps the voices to himself.

 

His father gets more and more brutal as time goes by. He knocks Bruce’s head around, saying that Bruce would be just as useful if he were paralyzed. Luckily it hasn’t happened yet, but Bruce tightens his neck brace anyway.

 

The lessons are dreadful, if they can even be called that. His father will ask him impossible questions and smack him in the back of the head when he gets them wrong. When Bruce protests and says that he shouldn’t even be doing this if his father won’t let him leave for college or even to get a job, he gets bent over the table and his back is whipped with the belt. The brace on his spine absorbed most of the damage, so the beating lasted three times as long as usual.

 

And through it all, that little voice is there. It was just whispers at first, barely even words, but then it started to grow more lucid, and a little bit louder, until they were fairly loud whispers. He tried his best to ignore them, but they got worse and worse.

 

_Kill him._

_You should jump out of a window… you’d die. Be free._

_Kill your mother._

_Kill your mother!_

He would hide under his covers and whimper himself to sleep most nights. Almost every night, Bruce has to listen to his father raping his mother. He would hear her sob, hear the bed creak, and he wants to go to her so badly. Wants to rip his father off of her, cut off his penis and –

But that’s just what his mind is telling him to do. He refuses to believe he has “voices in his head” just yet, they still sound like his voice, so they’re more like thoughts than a voice in his head.

 

As the whispers get louder, they sound less and less like his voice.

 

Ten days pass, and although he gets to remove his ankle brace, he feels as trapped as ever. He still limps; it’s hard to put his weight on it. So naturally, his father tells him to “walk normal boy” or he’ll hit him. It hurts, but he doubts it hurts as much as the smacking he’d get if his father caught him limping.

 

Rebecca would spend the day hours handcuffed to the stairs. She looks weak and she’s as malnourished as Bruce is. He knows that his mother is being chained to the house because it will keep Bruce there. He could be as healthy as a horse, but his father knows he won’t leave if he can’t take his mother with him. Damn him for using his mom as a weapon against him.

 

Two days after he got to take his brace off, his father opens his study door a little too silently and catches him limping into the kitchen to fetch water for his mother.

 

“What did I tell you about limping, boy!” he shouts, and Bruce freezes and turns to look at him.

 

“I’m sorry sir,” he says quietly.

 

 _Kill him_.

 

“You’re _sorry?_ ”

 

_Stab his fucking face._

 

“You’re sorry, you’re _sorry_ , that’s all I ever  hear from you, is I’m _sorry_ ,” he sneers and approaches Bruce, who doesn’t even cower.

 

“Would you prefer I don’t apologize, sir?” Bruce says tiredly, much too worn out from lack of sleep to even care about not having a “tone.”

 

“Boy, you’d better – ” he raises his hand, but Rebecca screeches,

 

“Don’t you _fucking touch him!_ ” it’s the loudest she’s managed to get in days. He wheels on her and starts to smack her around instead, telling her she’ll only speak when spoken to, and Bruce backs slowly, slowly into the kitchen.

 

 _Get a knife_.

 

Bruce goes to the knife rack and pulls out their largest steak knife.

 

_Stab it in him._

His hand trembles on the handle, and he wishes his arm wasn’t broken so he could hold it in both hands to steady it.

 

 _Stab him_.

 

He goes back out to where his father is beating his mother, and he holds the knife out with a shaking hand.

 

“Stop it!” he shouts, pointing the knife directly at the man. “Stop hitting her!”

 

_Fucking stab him._

 

His father whirls around, fist still clenched. His eyes land on the knife and there's a flash of fear but he doesn't back off. He doesn't drop his hand or apologize or back away. Instead he starts to laugh, loudly and frenzied.

"Put that thing away before you hurt yourself boy!" he sneers. "We both know you don't have the guts to actually use it!"

 

“Back away from her!” Bruce’s voice is shaking, he’s terrified, and he wishes he had more conviction in his words  because he sounds pitiful. His father doesn’t move, just continues to sneer. “I said b-back away!” Bruce brandishes the knife forward in a slashing arc.

 

"And if I don't?" his father asks, leaning back from the knife but refusing to take a single step. "What are you going to do? You think you have the guts you little shit?"

 

Bruce lunges forward the knife, and the amount of pleasure he gets out seeing his father cower away for one moment is astronomical. He wants to lunge again and again, he wants to do what his head is telling him to do, he wants to see the fear in his father’s eyes.

 

But he won’t. He won’t give in. He won’t indulge the loud whispers at the back of his head encouraging murder.

 

“Stay back,” he says, his voice a little bit stronger now. “Stay back or I will use this!”

 

"You little fuck," His father growls. But he takes a step back, realizing the disadvantage he's at. Bruce is armed while he has only his fists and belt. If he could get to the kitchen he could get a knife and with his superior strength and speed he'd have the upper hand again.

 

Bruce watches him for a moment before turning quickly to his mother, looking up every few seconds to make sure he hasn’t moved as he tries to saw at the chain of her handcuffs with the serrated part of the blade.

 

He makes the mistake of not looking up, and his father creeps silently past while Bruce saws at her chain, but she fainted quite some time ago, when he’d started to beat her. If she’d been awake she might have been able to warn him.

 

But she isn’t awake.

Bruce hears the whisper in his head, louder than it’s ever been, clearer than it’s ever been.

 

**_Duck_.**

 

He’s never been given such an order like that before, and he obeys without thought. The knife in his father’s hand swings right where his neck had been half a second before, so close he feels the breeze. He spins and lunges beneath his father’s arm, trying to make it to the glass door in the kitchen. If he can break it, he can get out, and come back for his mother.

 

His heart is pounding in his chest and he realizes that that voice isn’t his anymore. He hadn’t known the knife was coming. Some part of him did, some part of _something_ in him did, and it saved his life.

 

 _Stab him!_   It's gone back to loud whispers, and he hears footsteps thudding behind him as he runs down the hall to the kitchen.

 

He doesn’t make it to the door. A hand in his hair stops him, and an icy pain in his shoulder seizes him up. He drops to the white tile, and the red of his blood is bright on its polished surface. He moans in pain as his father rips the brace from his neck, but luckily the back brace is metal and has far too many buckles for him to rip off.

 

He dropped his own knife when he was knocked to the ground, and now all he can do is wheeze in pain and hope his father will beat him, and not slice him up.

 

His father stands over him, brandishing the knife. He looks like something out of a bad slasher movie. His eyes are wide and his lips stretched into a manic grin as he holds the blade above Bruce.

"You little fucker. You deserve this. If you had just listened to me this never would have happened but you didn't. You were asking for this from day one you son of a bitch. You and your whore mother.”

 

There’s a gleam of light beside him, and Bruce looks to the side. It’s the knife. It’s just out of reach. He looks back up into his father’s face, watches the knife comes down. He rolls to the side, his fingers close around the knife.

 

He hears it now. It’s not a whisper anymore.

 

**Stab him!**

 

Before he even tells his hand what to do, it comes slashing forward, and he watches as blood flows freely around the knife he’s just embedded in the side of his father’s ribcage. The man wheezes and falls sideways, groaning and coughing, gasping for air. His own knife fell out of his hand and skidded away, leaving him powerless beneath Bruce. He pulls himself to a shaky stand and watches his father gasp for air, eyes wide and panicked. Bruce feels dizzy, and he wants to walk away, but that voice is there again. It’s deep, strong and commanding, it has a little bit of a growl now. It sounds monstrous.

 

**You can’t leave him. He’ll get up. He’ll hurt you. He’ll hurt mom. Stop him.**

Bruce looks down at the man with apathy, and goes down on one knee, grabs his chin, and forces him to look up into Bruce’s eyes. “If you had been a good man, this wouldn’t have happened,” he says, and takes the handle of the knife, and pulls it out in one swift motion.

 

He doesn’t know how many times he brought that knife down. All he knows is his father isn’t recognizable as human anymore. His hands are dyed red, his legs, and his feet. His white cast is blood red. He stands, and sees his face in the glass door. Every part of him is dyed bright red. _He_ doesn’t look human anymore. He looks like some kind of red devil.

 

Looking back down at his father, he releases the knife to land wetly in the puddle of blood beneath him, slowly stretching across the white linoleum. He doesn’t feel sad or scared anymore. The rage that he felt is slowly ebbing into a steady hum at the back of his mind, and he doesn’t know if it’ll ever go away.

 

And the voice is there again.

 

**Good job. Go save mom.**

 

He pulls his sweater off over his head so he’s in his mostly un-bloodied white button up underneath, and uses a washcloth to wash away as much of the blood he can from his hands, cast and face.

 

There’s little he can do for the rest of it though. He kneels to get the key for his mother’s handcuffs out of his father’s pocket and goes the long way to avoid the puddle of blood so he can go remove the handcuffs from her chafed wrist.

 

“Mom,” he whispers, shaking her awake gently. “Mom, wake up.”

 

His mother wakes up slowly, blinking up at him and almost screaming as he comes into view. All she sees is red and she thinks it’s his. She thinks her Bruce is standing over her, covering in his own blood, about to die because of her husband and because she wasn't strong enough to save him.

"Baby, oh baby I'm so sorry," she whispers, tears in her eyes. "I'm so sorry baby."

 

“It’s not me,” Bruce says softly, and he wants to touch her, to hug her, but he doesn’t want to dirty her with his father’s blood. “I… I killed him.”

 

"Y-you what?" she asks. "You killed him? He's gone?"

 

Bruce swallows, and nods slowly. “Yes. Don’t go into the kitchen. You might have a concussion, so just… just stay sitting here. I’m going to call the police.”

 

“You don’t have to – ” she starts, but he shakes his head.

 

“I’m not going to put you at risk by just burying him in the back yard. I… I have to do this.” He rubs her shoulder over her shirt before grabbing the house phone off the wall. He can’t help but chuckle a little. This is the first phone call he’ll ever be making without his father listening in, and it’s to report to the police that he’s been murdered.

 

“911, what’s the nature of your emergency?” the woman on the other end of the line says.

 

Bruce swallows hard. “Um, my name is Bruce and… I would like to report a murder.”


	9. Chapter 9

The police are there with ambulances in ten minutes. They take Bruce and his mother to the hospital while they arrange for a lawyer and permission from his mother to question him. In the mean time he is to be treated for his injuries and given a full psychiatric evaluation.

 

Bruce is sitting in a poorly lit room with black walls, handcuffed to a metal table. His face is pretty much devoid of emotion, and he’s not being fooled by the mirror on the other side of the room that stretches all the way across the wall. He knows it’s a window. He wonders if he’s looking anyone in the eye.

 

On the other side of the mirror stands only two people, one of which happens to be Bruce’s government teacher, ex-police officer Phil Coulson. He sighs as he looks through the window at the boy, and then turns to his old coworker, Maria Hill.

 

“I don’t know how this could have happened,” he says, shaking his head. “Bruce has always been such a good kid in school.”

 

"It appears his father has been beating him and his mother for some time." Hill says, handing Coulson the file. Inside is Mrs. Banner's statement along with photos of their various injuries and older scars. "It looks like he really snapped not long ago. Pulled Bruce out of school and was holding him and his mother hostage. We're waiting for an autopsy report to confirm he was an alcoholic. She isn't pressing charges and if Bruce’s story and the autopsy report match up we can write this up as a case of self defense and that will be all there is to it. You just need to get his story from him."

 

“I can do that,” Coulson says with a sigh, and he goes through the door.

 

Bruce doesn’t look up. The act of looking people in the eye makes him nervous and uncomfortable now. He’s looking down at his hands, at the places they didn’t quite manage to get the blood out from his nails. His neck is back in a brace, and his cast is still stained brown with blood they couldn’t remove. He’ll probably get new plaster added to it.

 

However, when he hears a familiar voice (or rather, a familiar throat-clearing cough) he does look up, into the face of one of his teachers.

 

“Mr. Coulson?” he asks hoarsely. “What are you doing here?”

 

"I used to work with the police." Coulson says, sitting down across from the boy. He looks absolutely miserable. Nothing like the cold blooded killer it would take to kill a man for no reason. Something pushed Bruce into this, he's sure of it. "They asked me to come in when they heard it was one of my students being questioned. I'm here to make this easier if I can."

He opens the file and briefly looks over Mrs. Banner's statement again. "Your mother's statement claims that your father hit you regularly. I know I never saw any evidence of it but I know you're not the type of person who would attack a man without good reason and considering the shape you were both in I'm inclined to believe her. But we need a statement from you. Can you tell me when the beatings began? Take all the time you need if it's hard."

 

Bruce looks up again, focusing on Coulson’s lips because eyes still scare him. He’s silent for a really long time, trying to keep from breaking down into tears or stammering too much.

 

“I was four, the first time he hit me,” he whispers.

 

And just like that, he starts to pour out. He recalls that day, when his mother had done something “wrong” and his father had smacked her, and Bruce grabbed his daddy’s hand to try and stop him, and he got a spanking until he couldn’t walk. His mother grabbed him up in her arms that night and whispered to him to _never ever do that again_.

 

But it didn’t stop there. Once his father had realized that he could get away with hitting them both, it made him doubly thrilled to bound home from work every day and strike his family.

 

He recalls a time when he was eight years old and he nearly had a baby sister. But less than two months into the pregnancy, his father cast her down the stairs. She broke her collarbone, and miscarried. He insisted that it was never his fault that she lost the baby, but she and Bruce know it is. Retrospectively, he’s very glad he doesn’t have a seven year old sister, because he would be beating her too.

 

He tells them about how he’d been exposed to second-hand smoke, and his father had nearly drowned him and exposed him to the elements for several hours in the night, and he’d contracted pneumonia because of it.

 

At one point during his story, tears start flowing down his cheeks. He isn’t really crying, it’s just a physical outlet of all the emotions within him that he can’t explain fast enough through words.

 

“And when I tried to stick up for her… he beat me bad. And told me to get in my car and crash it so it wouldn’t look like he’d done anything to hurt me,” his voice is hoarse and weak, like it’s about to crumble. “And… my friends told me that… he’d only signed for me to be given a week to live if I didn’t wake up.” He looks up right between Coulson’s eyes, the closest he can get without making eye contact. “He was going to let me die.”

 

Coulson's face is grim. Part of him wishes Bruce's father was still alive so he could shoot the man himself. But he knows if he was still alive Bruce would probably be dead and it's better this way. He curses himself for not seeing it before though. He wishes he had noticed and been able to help Bruce, before it got this far.

"And when you came back, that's when he locked you away?" he asks gently, earning a nod from Bruce. "And what happened that made you finally act to stop him? What did he do today that made it so you couldn't take any more?"

 

Bruce looks back down to the table top. He thinks about telling Coulson about the voice, but it hasn’t said anything since after he killed his father, so he hopes it’s a moot point. He hopes it’s gone for good.

 

“He was hitting mom. So I got a knife to try and get him to back off, and then he got a knife, and… I know he was going to use it. He would have…” he swallows. “And I knew that if he k – killed me, then there would be no one left to protect my mother.”

 

"I see." Coulson says, closing the file. He leans forward, offering Bruce a small smile. "Bruce I have no doubt, none whatsoever that you acted in self defense. With that argument and the evidence on your side you aren't going to get in trouble. But we need to know a little more. Is there anyone you spoke to about your father? Or someone who may have noticed that he was hurting you and could give us a statement?"

 

Bruce nods. “Pepper. Um, Potts. Um, you know her. She’s in – was in your class with me. Top grade? She… she had suspicions.” He looks up again. “Are you… going to bring her in? Here? Now? I’d… like to see her.”

 

Coulson nods. "We'll send a car over to her house and if she's willing to make a statement she'll be brought here. You can see her for a bit after, I'm sure that won't be a problem. After that we'll have to take you back to the hospital for your injuries and to talk to a therapist."

 

The wait isn’t long before that door is opening to allow Pepper in. He squints up at the door, but he can’t really see her. His glasses are long gone, and he can’t see clearly to the door, but he’d recognize that bright orange hair anywhere.

 

“Pepper,” he whimpers, close to breaking down into tears again.

 

"Oh god, Bruce!" Pepper cries, running up to him, stopping just short of giving him a hug.

Bruce looks absolutely dreadful. He's black and blue everywhere and doesn't look like he's showered in weeks. His hair's a mess and his face is barely recognizably human under all the bruises and cuts. He's holding himself stiffly and Pepper is sure his bones are as broken now, if not more so, than they were when he left the hospital.

Besides that, he looks miserable and rightly so. The pain in his expression goes deeper than just physical misery. It's deep and haunted and she can feel a shadow of it just by looking at him.

"I told them everything I suspected." she assures him. "I told them what I saw, what I thought I saw, about your father in the hospital. About everything. They'll know you did the right thing Bruce. God, I'm so sorry I couldn't help you sooner."

 

Bruce takes her hand and squeezes it hard, tears leaking from his eyes as Coulson stands to give them a minute. He can even hear him address whoever else is behind the mirror to let them be alone for a little while.

 

“Do you think… I mean, does anybody else know?” he asks her softly. “I don’t want… people at school to know that I… I don’t want anyone to be afraid of me.”

 

"No one knows. No one lives near you and no one else was contacted by the police. You're not on facebook or anything so it won't get out and they won't get a word out of me. You know I know how to keep a secret." Pepper promises, squeezing his hand back and offering him a small smile.

 

He sniffles gently, and whimpers on an exhale, and then the levee breaks. He starts to sob quiet little sobs through his nose, and leans over sideways as best he can on her shoulder. She pets his hair and whispers to him for quite some time before a man comes into the room and tells them that he has to take Bruce to the hospital. Bruce promises to call her, and leaves with him.

 

He’s re-casted and re-braced at the hospital, and they do another examination to find that while he hasn’t healed any he also hasn’t gotten much worse, and that he can start a real recovery now that he won’t be abused any longer. His mother is in the same room as him, and as soon as they’re near one another they just cling and cry and laugh, hardly believing that this has happened.

 

The horror of the situation hits him when he’s evaluated for several mental disorders, and his tests come back positive for bipoalar disorder and schitzophrenia. They assure him that it’s very easily regulated with medication and proper care, and that his mother is the best possible person to help him grow through it. But to him it sounds like a total nightmare. They tell him that it’s possible that voice may come back during other highly stressful periods in his life, and to never hesitate to tell someone about it so they can help him before it gets too bad. He’ll probably be in therapy for the rest of his life. A small price to pay for ridding himself and his mother of their curse.

 

He’s kept in the hospital for one week before he’s released back to school. He still has a back brace, and he’s on crutches now, but the neck brace is gone, as well as most of the bruises and cuts on his face. His friends demand to know what happened, and he lies and tells them that he and his mother were held captive by his father, but they managed to call the police and he was going to spend the rest of his life in prison.

 

Pepper is there for him as much as she can be. She's still technically dating Obadiah so she can't sit with his and the others at lunch and Tony isn't talking to her again but she comes for Bruce after every class to help him carry his books. Now that he doesn't have to be home at a certain time Bruce can stay with her after school and get caught up on his schoolwork without having to worry about wasting time talking. Pepper seems more than happy enough to spend hours with him, catching him up on all the gossip, telling him that Joshua has started talking and knows more than fourteen words by now, including her and her sibling's names. She also brings him up to speed on her science fair project which will be ready for the show in another week.

 

Bruce is still sad that he hadn’t asked Pepper earlier, but it’s just prom. There will be another one. It isn’t even _senior_ prom, so it’s less important. He’ll have another chance to ask her. Besides, he’s certain that she won’t stay dating Obadiah for long, because he’s not a very nice person, and he doesn’t treat Pepper very well. Not as well as she should be treated. Not as well as Bruce would treat her. He’d treat her like a fucking queen. That is, if she wanted to be treated like a queen.

 

Even looking at Obadiah makes him angry. Deep, hot anger that centers in his chest, and he let it fester for a few days before he realized that it was the same kind of anger he felt right before he stabbed his father a couple dozen times. And that scares the hell out of him. His friends notice, too. They see the way that Bruce skitters anxiously away from Obadiah every time he approaches with Pepper, they see the looks he gives the bigger boy when his back is turned.

 

“Are you afraid of Stane?” Tony asks one day at lunch after Bruce cowered in a book as the bigger boy passed by with Pepper on his arm.

 

“Afraid?” Bruce’s head snaps up to look Tony square between the eyes. The subject of fear itself makes him angry, because he doesn’t ever want to be afraid of anyone again. “I’m not _afraid_ of him I want to _cut_ his _fucking face_ ,” he snaps.

 

Silence drifts across their table, and Bruce slowly shrinks down a few inches.

Clint approaches him later that day, when the others aren't around. He knows about abuse and about anger and he says if Bruce ever wants to talk he gets it and he's there. He tells him that that kind of anger comes from dealing with shit situations and he's seen what it's done to his brother and he won't let that happen to Bruce too. He doesn't push anything but he gives Bruce his number.

 

The next day, Bruce apologizes to everyone at lunch for his words the day before, and asks them all to come over to his house that Saturday for a group party. He invites Pepper, too, but she has a movie date with Obadiah that night. He has to make a strong effort not to curse just at the sound of his name. He wonders if he has tourettes, too. He’ll have to ask his therapist on Monday.

 

His mother is thrilled to have everyone over, and she spends all night making snacks for them _her_ way, without a care in the world that she’s standing on the cleaned linoleum where her husband was murdered just a couple short weeks ago. They watch a couple movies and play a game of cards, and set up a huge blanket fort in the middle of the living room because he doesn’t have a crazy father there to hit him for making a mess.

 

Close to midnight when they’re all huddled in the tent, Bruce tells them that there’s something very serious he needs to let them know, and that he’s very scared about it. Once he has five pairs of eyes on him, he starts slowly and surely, so he’s sure not to waste a word.

 

“You guys have been my friends all the way through middle school and through high school, and I’ve never felt closer to any group of people in all my life. But you should know that… um, well, after my father was t-taken away, I was given a mental evaluation. And I… I have bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Wh-Which isn’t multiple personality disorder like a lot of people think, that’s something else entirely. Um, it’s actually just… like… hearing voices. In my head. Only sometimes. Not for a while. But, um, it could come back one day, and… combined with bipolar disorder, it can create very… dangerous situations. I trust you guys more than anyone, which is why I didn’t tell you in school, I didn’t want anyone… overhearing. What you saw yesterday was a small outburst. I-I’m seeing a therapist about it, but, um, you guys shouldn’t feel obligated to be my friends if you don’t feel safe.”

 

They're all quite for a moment before Tony snorts and Clint mutters "Don't be stupid." and the tension breaks. Steve and Thor ask him earnest questions about his disorder, wanting to be there to help him, while Tony asks if there are any hot chicks in his head or if they're all just angry dudes telling Bruce to stab them all. None of them leave though and that's all Bruce wanted. They all fall asleep in a big tangle of limbs on the floor, everyone touching some part of Bruce’s body. His shoulders, his hands, his chest, just to be there with him. It feels so good to be touched gently and with affection, and Bruce sleeps better than he has in years.


	10. Chapter 10

In the morning, Bruce tells them to promise not to tell anyone else, not a soul, not even Pepper, and of course they all agree. He’s most nervous about Natasha, but even she seems earnest in her swearing not to tell a soul. He likes the fact that nobody has to rush out, and everybody leaves in their own time. Natasha leaves first, Clint shortly after, followed by Thor. Tony and Steve hang around for a while longer until Tony is called home by his father, and it’s just him and Steve. Steve spends another night there. Bruce has never had a single sleepover before, so a double-sleepover is unheard of. He doesn’t think he’s ever had so much fun before. (Except when he studies with Pepper)

 

Things are normal for a while. Pepper still tutors him now, but she insists Rebecca doesn’t have to pay her. Bruce gets brand new nice glasses to replace the cheap dime-store non-prescription glasses they got temporarily, and his mother gives him a new cell phone too, with unlimited calling. Bruce also gets an internship with the local elementary school as staff for watching children who need somewhere to go for a couple extra hours before their parents can come pick them up. They see his back brace and they think he’s part robot, and quite suddenly he’s the favorite counselor there.

 

The science fair rolls around after school next Wednesday, and Pepper is incredibly nervous. Obadiah shows up for all of two minutes to kiss Pepper on the cheek (Bruce has noticed she won’t let him kiss her on the lips) take some snacks, and leave. Bruce stays the whole time, standing near Pepper all night to keep her nerves down while she talks to the judges.

 

Three hours later and the awards are being announced. Pepper wins third place out of five. She would have been devastated about not winning, but Bruce is so happy for her that she can’t be bothered. At least she placed, it’s better than not winning anything at all. And she knows that her mother doesn’t even care that she entered at all, so Bruce was really the only person she was trying to impress. And impressed he is. He takes her out for ice cream after, and they sit in the warm late-spring night stealing bits from one another’s sundaes.

 

Pepper loves being able to spend time with him again. It's the happiest she's been in a long time even if she does hold back a little more than she once would have. She keeps their talk happy, focusing on her almost victory and how their studies are coming along and how Bruce seems so much brighter these days. She makes sure to steer clear of their problems because like Bruce said, they aren't responsible for each other.

  
So she doesn't ask Bruce if he can talk to Tony about letting her tutor him again. She wishes she could because without her tutoring job she's bringing in nothing for college. She's lost about eight weeks pay which from Tony's very desperate family is over three thousand dollars. It'll take her years to earn back that money. But that's not Bruce's problem and even if he wanted to help she couldn't bring down his good mood. She doesn't talk about her problems with Obadiah either or how much worse Paul has gotten since she's been spending all her time at home.

 

Bruce is healing at a very rapid rate, and the doctors say that has to do in part with him having such a good attitude. They say that a healing environment makes for good healing, so his loving mother and all the time she allows him to spend with his friends is good for his process. And when he spends time with Pepper he feels like he could just take off his brace and go sprinting. He doesn’t. But he feels like he could.

 

A week later, and his father’s autopsy report comes back. He reads over it, and what he finds is incredibly alarming. He explains it to his mother, since she understood only the medical half of it, and she actually laughed.

 

That night, he invites Pepper over to his house, just to hang out. She hasn’t actually been there if it’s not to tutor him, even if she always stays a little longer just to hang around and be content. She has dinner with them, and then when they’re in the living room alone, he pulls out the folder and holds it on his lap.

 

“This is my father’s autopsy report,” he says. “I… I needed to tell someone about what they found. I think I want to look into this more closely once I graduate college.”

 

He opens the folder and begins handing Pepper the papers and x-rays, but he keeps the photographs of his cut open body to himself.

 

“Those are the records of cause of death. He died of severe internal bleeding in his lungs and stomach, which caused him to go into respiratory arrest,” he talks like this is a murder mystery, as if Pepper isn’t holding the death certificate of a man _he_ murdered. “Which is all well and good, that’s exactly what you’d expect. The strange part is, they took tissue and blood samples to determine whether or not he was an alcoholic, and they found something. Something other than alcohol.”

 

He hands her another paper, covered in colorful diagrams and words that are more than two centimeters long.

 

“They found fatal levels of gamma radiation in his body. Which is sort of unusual, since we are exposed to gamma radiation every single day just by being in the sunlight, but we can process it. His body was holding it in, he was turning into a human gamma-nuclear reactor. One more year and he would have started getting incredibly sick, and eventually it would have killed him. Gamma radiation is a very mild form of radiation, which is why it didn’t kill him, but he’d been exposed to such high levels that it was starting to warp him. Into something… almost inhuman. He’d always been a fairly angry man, but this… he barely had any of his humanity left.”

 

"Which explains why he was treating you even more cruelly than before. Why he was just going to let you die in the hospital and why he locked you in here. He was insane and dangerous." Pepper says a little sadly. "It's too bad. If someone had caught on earlier he might have been able to get help. But he was always cruel, so it seemed like a normal escalation."

 

“He got that radiation from his work. Which means he was working on something. Something dangerous. Well, he probably didn’t think it was dangerous if it was gamma radiation, so he got cocky, so he was exposed. His project will be put into storage, whatever it was. Once I get out of college I’ll dig it up and see what it was that he was spending so many years on that it dosed him _that_ heavily.” He laughs when he sees Pepper’s concerned expression. “Of course, _I’ll_ take precautions. I have the test subject right here for what happens if you don’t,” he says as he fans the documents gently.

 

"Good. Though I think someone would catch on pretty early if you started behaving like him. You're so sweet, just insulting someone would make them suspicious." Pepper laughs. "It's good that you've got a passion now but you can't let it take up all your time just yet. There's still two years of high school left."

 

“That project will stay hidden for years unless someone picks it up, and I know my father. He wouldn’t have been working with a partner. It’ll wait for me ten years if I leave it,” Bruce says. “I’ve got much more pressing matters currently. For instance, getting _you_ to watch Lilo and Stitch. I still can’t believe you haven’t seen it!”

 

And things are still normal. More normal than they ever have been.

 

At least for Bruce. Pepper isn’t quite so lucky.

 

Paul has been getting grabbier and grabbier. She even tried to talk to her mother about it, but she just told her to “swat him away” as if she thinks it would actually work. Bruce is so oblivious to her problems because she hasn’t talked about them. He doesn’t realize the effect his words had on her so many weeks ago. “Out of sight, out of mind” as they say, even if he isn’t meaning to do it on purpose.

 

Because she isn't making money she has to start looking for a job but while she looks she's spending more time at home than ever. Which means more time with Paul and worse, more time alone with Paul. Her siblings spend time away, hanging out with friends, which is usually when Pepper would be out working. But now it's just her and Paul, alone in the tiny trailer.

She keeps her pepper spray on hand at all times, as a precaution but it only deters him so much. He's always there, breathing down her neck or touching her hips or butt. One time he even went so far as to "accidentally" touch her chest. She'd slapped him for it and been scolded by her mother later. Having Bruce back is a godsend because it means she has somewhere she can go, even if she can't tell him how bad it's getting.

She's pretty sure Paul has been trying to get into her car too. She's seen him outside, leaning on it or just looking through the windows at the necklaces hanging from the rear view mirror. She takes the precaution of moving them to her school locker but that doesn't seem to deter Paul. At least two nights a week he's out there, just looking at her car. It makes her start checking the backseat in the mornings, just to make sure he isn't there.

 

It’s less than a month away from prom when he finally does it. She’d gone to a friend’s house on a Saturday, allowed her to be picked up from the side of the road, quite a distance away from the trailer park, and when she dropped Pepper off on the street the next day like she requested, (“Really, it’s fine! The night is beautiful, I want to do some walking under the stars”) she came to realize that her car had been broken into. The door was a good bit mangled, and there was a lot of things missing. Her backpack had been ransacked, two pairs of shoes were gone, and every single pair of earrings from the ashtray was missing. Including her grandmother’s.

 

Her shoes and the other earrings don't matter much. But her grandmother's earrings are all that's left of her. Pepper and her grandmother had been close which was why she hadn't let her mother pawn them in the first place. And now they're gone. Her little diamond flowers, her absolute favorite things in the world, gone. Stolen by a greedy bastard who's made her life miserable since he set foot in her home.

She slams the broken door of her car and runs into the house, eyes blazing. Adam and Leslie are both at sleepovers for the night so there's no one there but her, Paul and Joshua. The baby seems perfectly content on the floor, barely noticing his older sister as she kicks in the door and storms up to the older man.

"Where are they?" she demands, getting closer to him than she ever willingly has before. "Where are my earrings? I know you stole them and I want them back goddammit!"

 

“Whoa, whoa, little lady, what’s all the distress?” Paul says, between a laugh and a sneer. “Earrings? I don’t know nothin’ about no earrings.”

 

"I've seen you looking into my car! You hang around it all the time, looking in at my things." Pepper accuses. "The door is broken and my shoes and earrings are gone. I don't care about most of them but the little diamond flowers I want back! Where the hell are they?"

 

“I didn’t touch no earrings or no shoes of yours, so pipe down!” Paul snaps. “I didn’t touch none of your shit things so shut the fuck up!”

 

"Then who took them? Joshua?" Pepper yells, gesturing to the toddler on the floor. "I know it was you! You stole them and you can admit it and give them back or I'm calling the cops!"

 

“You ain’t callin’ no cops cause I ain’t took nothin’!” Paul hollers, enunciating so loudly that he spits on her face. She cries out in disgust and heads for the phone, only to be grabbed from behind. “You ain’t callin’ no goddamn cops!” he shouts, one arm around her waist and one hand trying to cover her mouth to keep her from screeching.

 

Pepper stomps on his foot and elbows him hard in the gut, forcing him to let her go. She staggers back, glaring daggers at him as she puts space between their bodies. "Don't you touch me you pig!" She shouts, grabbing her purse and digging in it for her cell phone. "You can tell the cops you didn't take them, see if they believe it any more than I do!"

 

He’s drunk, which makes him even stupider, which makes him even more dangerous. He lunges for her, but he doesn’t even get a hand on her because his eyes start burning so bad that he’s sure she just clawed them out of his head. His nose burns, his throat closes up, he drops to the floor of the trailer like a rock and starts to scream.

 

“YOU BITCH!” he screeches. “YOU FUCKING BITCH I’M GONNA GET YOU!”

 

Pepper's shaking. She hasn't had to use her pepperspray in three years and seeing the effects it can have always scares her. But she doesn't have time to think. She goes to her room and grabs the money she has hidden in her dresser, a duffel bag and a coat for Joshua before scooping the baby up and heading out the door. She stops at her car and fills the duffel with her schoolbooks and as much of her clothes as she can before slamming the back door and heading for the street. She'd drive but with her passenger door ruined it isn't safe, especially with the baby there.

She leaves the trailer park and starts heading for town, the reality of her situation dawning on her. Her things are gone, she's essentially kidnapped her little brother and run away from home, leaving a drunken, violent pervert writhing on the floor. She has no friends she can go to and her mother won't be able to come get her for another six hours at least.

That's when she starts to cry. She wants to call Bruce and beg for his help but she isn't her responsibility. They're just friends and she can't burden him with her troubles.

So she gets out her phone and dials Obadiah, hoping that he'll at least have a few words of comfort to offer her over her loss even if she can't explain the entire situation.

 

“Oh, hey sweet heart,” he picks up the phone with an over-exaggerated drawl that makes her cringe. “I was _just_ talking about you. What’s up?”

 

"My car was broken into." she says, barely keeping her tears from becoming outright sobs. She knows he can hear them in her voice but at least she still sounds human and he can comprehend her, no matter how much she wants to just break down and cry. "My grandmother's earrings are gone."

 

“Whoa, slow down, what’s the matter?” Obadiah says, the drawl suddenly gone from his voice, and he almost sounds like he cares. She wonders if maybe he is a good guy. “Your car – holy shit, someone broke into your _car?_ Do you have insurance?”

 

"Yes but I don't really care about the car. It was cheap junk." she says, choking on her tears again. "My earrings were stolen Obadiah! My grandmother's earrings!"

 

“Your… your earrings,” he says slowly. “You… you’re this worked up over a pair of earrings?”

 

"You're not listening to me Obadiah!" she yells, startling Joshua who starts to wriggle in her arms. "Those were my favorite earrings! They were family heirlooms and they meant a lot to me!"

 

“Pepper, Christ, they’re just earrings. You should be a lot more concerned about your car then a pair of damn earrings,” Obadiah scoffs.

 

Pepper nearly throws her phone. This is what she gets for dating a jerk that refuses to listen to her. "I don't give a damn about my piece of shit car Obadiah! I am upset about losing my only connection to my grandmother! Those earrings were important to me but apparently that means nothing to you!"

She stops to take a few deep breaths, readjusting Joshua on her hip and getting herself under control. She suddenly understands why she was always so uncomfortable around Obadiah. She can't trust him to be sympathetic. He won't comfort her over a pair of earrings that she has said several time mean a lot to her, how could she trust him not to judge her for living like she does?   
  
Her emotions better under her control she raises her phone to her ear again, her voice still choked with tears. "I can't do this Obadiah. I'm sorry but find someone else to take to prom. I can't go with someone so insensitive. I'm sorry but I think we're over."

 

“What – Pepper!”

 

But she doesn’t hear the rest. She hangs up on him and puts the phone in her purse. She listens to it ring four more times before apparently he gives up, and she just continues on her way. She has no idea where she’s going. In such a state, if anyone sees her, there’s no doubt they’ll think the baby is hers, and her reputation as a good girl will be totally trashed. Maybe she’ll just find a nice ditch to hide in until her mother can pick her up.

 

Less than fifteen minutes down the road, a pair of headlights illuminate behind her. She just ignores them, until the car grinds slowly to a halt beside her. She grabs for her pepper spray again as the window rolls down, but she’s surprised to hear Rebecca’s voice.

 

“Pepper? Is that you?”

 

"R-Rebecca?" she asks, all her emotions returning to the surface. This is exactly what she needs, Bruce's mom seeing her and telling Bruce what a mess she is. They've just gotten back to being friends, with all the changes he's going through he won't want anything to do with her and her family troubles.

 

“Oh my gosh, sweet heart, you look like you’ve been through hell,” Rebecca says, putting her car in park and unbuckling her seat belt so she can step out. “Are you okay? Why are you out here with a baby – is that your brother?”

 

"One of, yeah." Pepper sniffs, adjusting the wriggling baby again. "I'm alright ma'am. You should head home, Bruce is probably waiting for you. I don't want to keep you."

 

“Where are you headed? I’ll give you a ride. I don’t like the thought of leaving you on the side of the road,” Rebecca says, wrapping her arm around the distressed girl’s shoulders. Pepper just whimpers. “Oh, sweetie, you aren’t going _to_ anywhere, are you? What are you running from?”

 

"Everything." Pepper says, finally breaking. She can't hold it in anymore, she just starts to sob. It's embarrassing and when she calms down she'll be mortified but she can't hold back any longer. She stands there and cries into Rebecca's shoulder, her sobs shaking her so much that Joshua begins to cry with her.

 

“Okay, come on, you don’t have anywhere to go but home with me. Don’t you even think about arguing with me,” She ushers the sobbing girl into the passenger seat of her car, situating the seatbelt over her and the baby in her lap. “You can tell me everything that happened and we’ll get it sorted out tomorrow. You can stay the night, have you had dinner yet?”

 

Pepper shakes her head, tears that were clinging to her cheeks shaking off and falling on Joshua's head. "Neither has he. But please, you don't have to take care of us. I can find a place in town to wait for my mom to come pick him up." She doesn't say them because she isn't going to lie. She doesn't plan on going back to the trailer any time soon. She has enough money for a few nights in a motel and she can decide where she wants to go after that.

 

“No, hush your mouth,” Rebecca says. “Bruce adores you, and who he loves, I love. You’re going to stay the night, just one night. I’m not asking you to move in.”

 

Pepper tries to smile but the tears just start again. The kindness is too overwhelming after all the stress and how lonely she's been. She holds Joshua a little tighter as they pull up to the house, like he's a shield that will ease whatever Bruce's reaction to her current state will be.

 

It’s Bruce’s natural reaction to want to greet his mother at the door, but he’s always afraid that she’ll think of her husband and how he would be in the doorway when she or he arrived, so he always waits on the stairs, which face the front door perfectly. His knees are bouncing as he anticipates a warm hug from his mother, but the first thing he sees is actually Pepper, holding her brother.

 

“Pepper?” he says, standing up a little too fast and sending a jolt of pain down his leg. “Pepper, what’s wrong?” he scuttles forward as best he can with the constraints of his brace. Worry is writ on his face, and he doesn’t even hesitate to brush her hair out of her face where it stuck there with her tears.

 

"Paul stole my earrings." she whimpers, dropping her eyes in shame. "He broke into my car and stole my grandmother's earrings and when I accused him he grabbed me so I pepper sprayed him and ran." The tears are coming back fast and she hugs Joshua to her a little more, despite the toddler fighting against her. "I couldn't stay there and wait for him to get his senses back and then come after me even angrier. You know how disgusting he is and I couldn't leave Joshua. He might have hurt him. And I tried to talk to Obadiah but he's an ass so we broke up and I'm so sorry for being such a mess."

 

“God, Pepper, no, you don’t have to apologize,” Bruce shakes his head. “Mom, could you go get her something to wear of yours so she doesn’t have to spend the whole night smelling like her house?”

 

Rebecca nods and hurries upstairs to grab something that will fit the slender girl.

 

“Let’s get Joshua strapped into my old high chair, my mom never got rid of my baby stuff because… um, never mind. We can give him something to eat and I’ll watch him while you take a shower, okay?”

 

Pepper nods and follows him into the house. They get out Bruce's old high chair, or Bruce gets it out while she watches, and she helps settle Joshua into it. She leaves him with Bruce, knowing she can trust him, and goes to shower off, taking an extra long time to really scrub herself before coming back in one of Rebecca's dresses. It's a little loose on her but it's comfortable and it doesn't stink like her trailer which is more than enough to make her happy.

By the time she rejoins them in the kitchen dinner has been made and Rebecca has started feeding Joshua who looks confused but excited at food that doesn't come out of a box. There's a plate waiting for Pepper too that she takes. She isn't very hungry but she nibbles a little to be polite.

 

“So tell me again, Paul stole your grandmother’s earrings?” Bruce says. “Do you know where they are? No, sorry, that’s a dumb question, you’d have them with you now if you knew where they were. God, Pepper, I’m so sorry this has happened to you.”

 

Pepper shrugs, all cried out by now. "There's nothing I can do. They're gone and when I go home he'll probably still be there and it'll go back to the uncomfortable looks and the touching and I'll deal with it. It is what it is."

 

“He’s still touching you?” Bruce says thickly, wondering how bad it’s gotten. Pepper hasn’t said anything to him in such a long time. Of course, they did sort of have an almost falling-out there after he asked her not to meddle in affairs with his father.

 

Pepper nods. "Yeah. He doesn't try anything, he just touches. He knows I won't hesitate to hurt him if he goes too far."

 

“And you didn’t,” Bruce huffs a laugh. “That should teach him a lesson. Especially if you walk around everywhere with your spray in your hand. But I’m sure he won’t stick around, once your mom finds out he broke into your car and stole your things and attacked you, he won’t be there long.”

 

"You don't know my mom." Pepper laughs bitterly. "He could be there for another few years as long as he doesn't do anything she sees. And she doesn't see much." Pepper stands up. "I should call her and let her know I have Joshua. She will notice if the baby doesn't wake her up in the morning."

 

“Pepper,” he grabs her hand, threading his fingers between hers before he even realizes he’s doing it. “I can’t let you go home if you’re going back to an environment where he’s still there. He’s a serious threat to you, and I know how these things can progress. First he’ll just be brushing you then it moves to groping, then one day he’ll hold you down and if your mother won’t listen to you she’ll damn well listen to me.”

 

Rebecca had excused herself at some point, expecting that they’d like to talk alone. Bruce hardly even noticed she’d gone. All he can do is look straight into Pepper’s eyes, and he realizes that she’s the only one he can make eye contact with without feeling nervous.

 

"No. Like you said Bruce, it's not your place to get involved." Pepper says, pulling her hand back. She doesn't want to but she has to before she gives in and lets Bruce make her into some damsel in distress who needs to be saved. "We're friends and I appreciate you letting me stay here tonight but you're not going to start sticking your nose into my family life. At least I can fight back."

 

“Pepper, wait,” he hauls himself up stiffly out of his chair. “What – what do you mean, not my place?”

 

He realizes suddenly that Pepper’s referring to what he said at the hospital. How he told her not to “get involved” with his father. She’s still walking away, so he grabs her by the shoulder to halt her.

 

“That’s not what I meant,” he says, even though she’s turned away from him, at least she isn’t trying to retreat anymore. “I didn’t want you to get hurt. My father was _deranged_. He could have – he would have killed you if he thought he could get away with it. And he thought he could get away with a lot, considering he tried to keep my mother and I hostage. I didn’t mean we can’t be there for each other.”

 

"Well excuse me if that's how I took it since you refused to even look at me for several weeks before hand when I really needed you. I'd lost half my friends and my job and then even you weren't talking to me!" Pepper snaps. "So excuse me if I took saying "you're not my girlfriend don't get involved in my business" to mean exactly that. Now let go of me."

 

Bruce doesn’t let go of her. He steps forward and wraps his arms loosely around her waist. He wishes he could rest his chin on her shoulder, but he’s short, so all he can do is rest his cheek on her back.

 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, trying not to cry. “I was dumb. I was jealous. I was so jealous that you were going with Stane, I thought I was going to lose my mind. I was angry at him for thinking he’s worthy to date you, I was… I was angry at you for saying yes to him. I wanted to ask you for weeks, since I found out that tenth graders could go to prom. That day you asked me to help you with your project; I was looking for you to ask you to go with me, but… I was so scared you would reject me. I’ve never been very good at maintaining my emotions because, I guess, I’ve always had them beat out of me. But I gotta start healing sometime, and if you don’t think I’m too much of a mess I’d like to start healing with you.”

 

Pepper sighs and lets herself relax a little against him. Not completely melting but letting some of the tension and the anger fall away. "I already told you I liked you. I told you when you asked me about prom that I would rather go with you and if you had stayed a little longer I would have told you that I could talk to Stane and hopefully let him down easy but you ran and you left me all alone. I still like you Bruce and I would like to heal with you too." She turns around in his arms and takes a step back, out of his reach. "We can try this, but ground rules are important. And when I say let me go I mean it."

 

He does cry now as he looks down. “I was afraid you would leave,” he says quietly. “I’m… scared of a lot of things. A lot more things that I thought I was scared of. I’m even scared of myself now because of what I’ve done. I’m scared I’ll do it again. I’m scared of the – ” he cuts himself off. He really doesn’t want to talk about that voice, and it hasn’t said a thing since that day, so it probably isn’t even there anymore. “I’m just really scared. And now I’m scared for you and your safety. He hasn’t gone over the edge yet, there’s still time to get you out without anyone getting hurt.”

 

"I don't want you to be scared Bruce and I'm not mad. It's just something you should know that when I say hands off I mean it and I expect you, at least, to agree to that. Obadiah didn't. Paul doesn't. My mom's last three boyfriends didn't. But I know you will. I trust you Bruce. But when it comes to my home life I know what I'm doing. Tonight's episode should serve as a pretty good example of what I can do. I won't let him hurt me, don't worry about that. I know I don't look it but I'm pretty tough."

 

“I- I’m sorry,” he looks down at his hands in disgust. “I shouldn’t have – I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he clenches his hands into fists and whines at his own foolishness.

 

"Bruce, no, you don't have to apologize." Pepper says, stepping forward again and taking his hands. "I'm not angry, I promise. It's okay. Please don't be upset."

 

“I swear, I won’t do that again, I swear.” He feels sick. He of all people knows what it feels like to be touched when you don’t want to be touched, and to be guilty of doing that to Pepper is to be guilty of tuning into his father just a little bit.

 

"I know you won't." Pepper says softly. She squeezes Bruce's hands reassuringly. "I know, I trust you. I know you'll never do anything I don't want. I'm not saying never touch me again or ask first, I'm just saying if I ask you to stop, stop. And I know you'll do that Bruce, you're a good person."

 

He sniffles and nods and squeezes her hands back. “I… am. I am a good person. I’m not my fath- ” his voice breaks and he clears his throat.

 

"I know." Pepper says, stepping closer and wrapping her arms around Bruce, pulling him into a hug. "You're not. We all know that. You're an amazing guy Bruce and if you still want to go to prom with me I'd be honored."

 

He nods into her shoulder, clutching the back of his mother’s dress so tightly he’s close to ripping it. “I want to take you to prom,” he mumbles. “I want – I want it to be perfect for you, I want you to be treated like a princess, like Obadiah should have been treating you and he w-wasn’t. I’m no prince but I want to try,” he sobs against her.

 

"You can be my prince, if you want." Pepper assures him, holding him tightly while he cried.

Pepper goes home the next day with Joshua. Paul is still there but he doesn't go near her. At first she's wary but after a few days she realizes that he is genuinely afraid. It shouldn't make her as happy as it does but she finally feels comfortable at home, even though her earrings are still missing.

Things get better at school too. Obadiah and his friends are jerks but she always has Tony or one of his friends around to make sure they don't get too nasty. Tony apologizes for acting like a child, which Pepper is pretty sure is mostly Steve's influence, and pays her for the time she'd missed.

She sits with them every day and gets to hold Bruce's hand in the hallways. It's the happiest she's been in a long time and she actually finds herself looking forward to prom as it draws closer.

 

She’d missed the big dress-buying date with all her friends, but Clint and Natasha go out with her to help her pick a knockout dress that will make Bruce roll on the floor when he sees her.

 

She continues tutoring Bruce, and his English grade does make a marked improvement. Even if it’s only a B minus to a B plus. His mother is thrilled with his progress, and she bakes him and Pepper brownies to celebrate.

 

Bruce calls Pepper on his cell phone nightly, just to wish her good night, and ask her if Paul has done anything to hurt her that day. The answer is always no, and Bruce is both relieved that she’s not in danger, and upset that he doesn’t have the chance to be her knight in shining armor. But, then again, Pepper Potts is no damsel in distress.

 

The night of prom finally arrives and Pepper goes to a friend's house so she can get ready without smelling like cigarettes. She spends a good hour on her hair, finally deciding to leave it down and curl it so it's elegant, using plenty of hairspray to lock the look into place. Then she shimmies into her dress and finally applies her makeup which takes another half an hour. Then the shoes dilemma and finally, jewelry. She has a necklace, a fake diamond pendant shaped like a star, that she wears and simple, thin silver bracelets to match. Then the earrings which she finally decides to go without because if she can't wear her grandmother's earrings nothing else will do.

She looks a bit unfinished but that's alright.

Just as she's finishing up a last minute touch up on her eyes the doorbell rings and she can hear two boys, Bruce and her friend's date, enter the hall.

Show time.

 

Her friend immediately squeals and runs down the hall, thumping down the stairs, and she hears her date say “you look hot babe!” before the hall is filled with kissing noises. She calls out for Pepper to hurry up, and goes out onto the porch to have her picture taken with her date by her mother.

 

Slowly, Pepper exits the room, heart pounding in her throat. She reaches the top of the stairs and looks down at Bruce. His hair has been combed and he’s wearing a grey suit and purple button-up and he looks a little bit stiff because he’s still got his brace under his jacket but he looks happy.

 

He forgets how to breathe as he looks up at the stairs at her. The navy blue silk of her floor-length gown looks radiant on her skin, and the diamond-studded belt and straps glitter in the light at the top of the stairs. Her hair is draped over her shoulders in ringlets, as well as a black sheer shawl. He just gapes for a few moments before murmuring,

 

“Hello Miss Potts.”

 

"Bruce," she says with a nod, thinking 'Mr. Banner' might make him uncomfortable. She stops at the bottom of the stairs, still looking down on him a little and starts to blush, not sure how these things go. With Obadiah she wouldn't have cared so much but with Bruce she wants to be perfect. She wants every hair in place, she wants to stand up tall and have the dress fall just right and look absolutely stunning for him.

"That suit looks really nice on you." she says finally, cracking the illusion that she's a fine, elegant, confident young lady.

 

Bruce can’t even think of a thing to say. He just looks her up and down dumbly, like he’s never seen anything so radiant in all his life. They’re quickly brought to the porch and their picture is taken side by side, and then one of all four of them is taken, and they get in the limo Pepper’s friend’s mom rented, and they’re whisked away to the hotel where  prom is taking place.

 

They have sparkling juice in the limo and Pepper’s friend and her date pretend it’s alcohol, but Bruce is perfectly content to know that it’s just juice thank you very much. They arrive fifteen minutes later, with plenty of money for Bruce to buy his ticket at the door without a couple’s discount.

 

Before they go, however, Bruce says he has something for Pepper, and takes her to a bench outside the hotel where they’re alone. The night isn’t very cold, thankfully, so Pepper doesn’t mind letting her knee and calf peek through the slit in the dress, and it somehow pleases her that Bruce only lets his eyes linger for two seconds before snapping back up to her face.

 

“What is it, Bruce?” she asks.

 

“Um, I have… I found, um I got you something – ” he says, reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. He pulls out a small black velvet box and hands it to her. “It’s not a ring or anything, so don’t be nervous.”

 

Pepper smiles, relaxing a little, and opens the box.

Inside are two little diamond flowers. Exactly like her grandmother's earrings. She takes them out of the box and looks a little closer and finds that they are, in fact, her grandmother's earrings. The exact same pair that had been stolen from her car.

She squeals a little in joy and hurriedly puts them on, feeling even better than she had when Bruce had come to pick her up. Her outfit is complete now, every piece in place and she couldn't be happier.

"Thank you Bruce!" she exclaims, throwing her arms around him. "Where did you find them?"

 

Bruce hugs her back stiffly, his brace restricting his movement. “It wasn’t too hard. I just had to rummage through every pawn shop that a drunken lunatic could get to within walking distance of your, um, park. Took me less than a week to find them.”

 

“How much did they cost you?” she asks.

 

“Never mind that,” he says, shaking his head.

 

“Bruce,” she says in a concerned tone, but he takes her hand in one of his own, and tucks her hair behind her ear with the other so he can see the glitter of the little flowers.

 

“No, stop. You can’t put a price on how important these earrings are to you. It doesn’t matter if they cost four dollars or a hundred and four, I would have paid whatever it took to see these earrings back where they belong. You make them beautiful.” Bruce says thickly, wondering if Tony would be smacking him in the head for how cheesy he sounds.

 

Pepper grins, her eyes filling with tears that she has to blink back to keep from smearing her make up. It might be cheesy but she can tell Bruce really means it.

"Can I kiss you? Because I really want to kiss you."

 

Bruce swallows and nods dumbly. He’d been expecting maybe a kiss on the cheek by the end of the night, but she wants to kiss him already and they haven’t even entered the building yet.

 

The kiss is like nothing Bruce was expecting. She smells sweet, as sweet as he remembers, and she’s wearing some kind of lip gloss with a vanilla flavor. He feels her eyelashes on his cheek, and her breath on his lips. He cups the side of her neck gently and kisses her slow and gentle, like he’s seen on TV.

 

They break apart feeling fuzzy and a little wobbly, before grinning stupidly at each other, and they go to the front table to pay for his ticket.

 

Bruce wasn’t a very good dancer even before he had the brace on his back, but tonight, he soars.


End file.
